[petsc-dev] Pause-for-approval Pipelines?

[Jed Brown]

Barry Smith <bsmith at petsc.dev> writes:

>> - readdocs pipeline
>> - merge-pipeline - auto starts - does the pre stage and pauses.
>
> how are they related? 

Not at all.   The ReadTheDocs pipeline is managed by readthedocs.org.

> I understood Jed wanted the readdocs pipeline done automatically so it was easy to review any readthedocs changes since the properly formatted new docs with the changes was made automatically in the MR and pushes. I am fine with this, though it seems silly to always do it instead of not just doing it when there is a change to docs or maybe a docs label. Just curious, is this done with a merge to master ?

We don't have control at that granularity.  We can disable the feature, but then we don't have a good way to review changes there.  I want to make writing and reviewing documentation changes as low friction as possible (because our docs, especially the manual, are pretty low quality and often out of date).

I figure if ReadTheDocs feels like they're wasting too much compute, they can add a finer grained control.

> The second pipeline I don't understand. Aside from letting people who don't use the GitLab API to  not have to hunt for the Pipelines window and cut and past their branch name in and the merge to master business does it serve any other purpose? Could we unset this for certain people who don't like it in the .gitlab-ci.yaml file?

What's wrong with using the API to release the paused job instead of using it to start a fresh pipeline?