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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Having the e2e smokes be a requirement for PR merge is frustrating. But I’ve been on the fence before with this on my own teams. It’s enticing to have a completely “clean” main branch that has not been infested with regressions caused by a PR.

    It also gives you confidence in the crummy cases where you need to push a fix to prod right now.

    If the e2e’s flap too much, then it is not an option. I’ve tried it and it lasts one sprint before we nix it. It’s just too frustrating and development comes to a standstill.

    We have a retry policy on any smokes that need to run in a step by step order, and we aggressively prune and remove smokes that frequently fail or don’t test for real issues.

    I actually think that’s the best way to handle it.

    Who fixes the issues that the smokes find?

    On teams I’ve been on, typically a junior dev. Sounds crummy, but it actually gives them more experience with the product/code. I have been that junior dev before and I found it a positive experience.


  • Ugh, what a mess. Thought about this for a while today and three thoughts started circulating in my head:

    1. Hire an actual lawyer and get firm legal advice on this issue. I think this would fall to the admins, not the devs. Maybe an admin who wanted could volunteer to contact a lawyer? We could do a gofundme for one-time consultation legal fees.

    2. Stop using pictrs completely and instead use links to a third party such as Imgur or whatever. They’re in this business and I’m sure already have dealt with it and have a solution. Yes it sucks that Imgur (or whatever third party) could delete our legitimate images at any time, but IMHO it’s worth it to avoid this headache. At any rate it offloads the liability from an admin. Of course, IANAL and this is a question we would want to ask a lawyer about.

    3. Needing a GPU increases the expenses for an admin significantly. It will start to not be worth it for quite a few to keep their instance running.

    Thanks for bringing up this point. This is obviously a nuanced issue that is going to need a well-thought-out solution.