Allow user-triggered workspace prebuilds

[shaal]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Currently, users are limited to predefined prebuilds, which are built automatically in a separate process. This restricts users' ability to reuse workspaces opened by other users on the same commit. Users have to rebuild things from scratch even if another user has already built that commit in their workspace.

Describe the behaviour you'd like

It would be helpful if any workspace loaded by a user could automatically trigger the creation of a prebuild for that commit. This would allow any other user opening the same commit to reuse the built workspace rather than rebuilding from scratch.

Essentially, it would behave like the existing prebuilds but be triggered by a user workspace rather than an automatic separate process. This would improve efficiency and sharing of workspaces across users.

Describe alternatives you've considered

An alternative would be to implement a manual trigger for users to request a prebuild from a workspace, rather than it being automated. However, this would place extra burden on users to remember to do this.

Additional context

This feature would significantly improve efficiency when multiple users are collaborating on the same repositories within Gitpod. Being able to automatically reuse existing workspaces without rebuilding for every user would save time and resources.

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[AlexTugarev]

An alternative would be to implement a manual trigger for users to request a prebuild from a workspace, rather than it being automated.

@shaal, how would that be different from creating workspace snapshots?

[shaal]

@AlexTugarev This feature request allows manual prebuilds for any project, not just those with auto-enabled prebuilds. When a user initializes a new workspace without a prebuild, all init tasks run first. Once complete, the user can opt to save a prebuild that will then serve that commit to future users.

Currently, prebuilds only exist for projects that specifically enable them as an automatic task on commit. This feature request allows saving manual prebuilds after initializing a workspace, creating shareable cached builds for any commit. When a commit url with a prebuild is shared, the recipient skips init tasks and loads a fast, prebuilt starting state. Without this, opening an uncached commit runs all initialization before use.

In summary, this feature democratizes prebuilds by letting users manually save state-serving commits for projects lacking auto-enabled prebuilds. This allows faster loading and collaboration by sharing parsed-out, pre-inited commit URLs.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[shaal]

This issue should be not get closed automatically