GitHub Actions usage on OpenWRT/LEDE main/master

[Stefan Kalscheuer]

Hi all,

I don't know if that topic ever came up yet, but I stumbled across it 
recently.

TL;DR:

Is there really a point in running GH actions 4 times on both main and 
master branch and both OpenWRT and LEDE org repositories or should we 
consider being little more economic with the resources, e.g. by 
disabling the actions on the mirror and/or the master branch?


Little more background:

The default branch was renamed from "master" to "main" with a sync to 
"master" for backwards compatibility. The git repo is mirrored to GitHub 
in the OpenWRT org ( https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt ) and also to 
the LEDE org ( https://github.com/lede-project/source ).

Then we have quite elaborate CI workflows using GitHub Actions which can 
trigger up to ~450 jobs (~200 build jobs plus setup/caching stuff) which 
take around 2 hours to complete (e.g. on current top commit 539cb53). 
That's totally reasonable considering the impact of the changes made. 
There are smaller changes that might just trigger 10 and run 5min.

Every aspect of this probably fine for itself, but when it all comes 
together...
The GH actions are triggered in all repos named on all branches, so we 
trigger all this at least 4 times (actually just ~3 times, as most 
pipelines are failing on the LEDE mirror)

I don't see a real benefit running all this stuff 4 times. Beside the 
eco aspect, that simply utilizes quite a few runners, so a new/updated 
PR sometimes takes an hour before the tasks get picked up and start running.

Cheers,
Stefan