Summary of Virtual Workshop 2

Key findings of the workshop were:

  • Dependency management remains a tricky problem that is coupled to CI/CD.
  • Open problem to ensure that external components remain correct.

Speaker Ryan M. Richard (AMES)

  • Video
  • Ryan discussed the best practices for multi-project CI/CD which have emerged so far.
  • Best practices can be found here

BOF Session

Disclaimer: many of the attendees attended for the presentation and did not attend the BOF session that followed. Thus discussion was more limited.

  • Attendees shared experiences maintaining multi-project CI/CD ecosystems.
    • Python-based projects easier to maintain because they do not require compilation, i.e., significantly simpler CI workflows.
    • In Python-based plugin ecosystems, dropping support for an old version of Python requires modifying the CI workflows of each plugin.
  • Attendees discussed open challenges in maintaining multi-project CI/CD ecosystems.
    • CI/CD workflows which determine if changes break downstream projects, especially when plugins are externally developed.
      • Attendees knew of other projects where the core project agreed to host CI/CD for all projects in order to ensure correctness.