Contributor Experience: Notifications on Broken Builds

[danielhelfand]

Generally, my experience contributing to Argo CD has been pretty great. Things are well documented and code base is pretty easy to follow.

One thing I have experienced quite a bit of though is broken builds when submitting pull requests. Some of these issues can take days to fix. It can make it confusing for contributors to understand if changes being submitted are the cause or if other factors are causing issues. Very often what I have done in the past is look at other prs to see if builds are experiencing similar issues.

One answer to this challenge for a lot of people might be to say to do more to prevent flakey tests and build breaks, but this is itself difficult to rely on for a project the size of argo-cd. Breaks are inevitable and of course a lot of efforts are made to discourage flakey testing practices or breaks. Another suggestion to this might be to just fix the build, but there often isn't any follow up for contributors encountering issues who might be discouraged after the fact. This also adds to maintainer responsibilities of having to debug these issues.

I think having some place to both report and check on build status or known issues (e.g. particular flakey tests) that is easily accessible by contributors would be really helpful. Also, being able to communicate this information out to contributors' pull requests could help both maintainers/contributors debug more quickly. This would also reduce the need for maintainers to continue to communicate this out.

There are a number of ways this could be approached, so I wanted to open this up to discuss first and hear feedback.