Please make Werft support arbitrarily long branch names

[jankeromnes]

Bug description

Currently, Werft spontaneously fails your Pull Request if your branch name is not extremely short:

gitpod/.werft/build.ts

Lines 52 to 55 in 73cbeef

	const maxBranchNameLength = 20;
	if (config.previewEnvironment.destname.length > maxBranchNameLength) {
	werft.fail("check-branchname", `The branch name ${config.previewEnvironment.destname} is more than ${maxBranchNameLength} character. Please choose a shorter name!`)
	}

The only solution is to pack up your work and move to a completely new branch / Pull Request.

This is becoming a significant tax on Gitpod's developer velocity and happiness:

• Add environment variable name/value length validation in UI #8046 (comment)
• Rate-limit new prebuilds to 50 / user / minute to prevent incidents #8502 (comment)
• Improve monitoring and feedback for errors during workspace cluster selection #8485 (comment)
• WIP: [kots]: use Helm for the Installer job #8490 (comment)
• [prebuilds] Introduce 'failed' state for prebuilds #8601 (comment)
• [jb] track client project sessions #8280 (comment)
• [server] use owner and repo name for workspace id #7390 (comment)
• Rename editor preference section heading #7428 (comment)
• fix: update gateway instructions #8421 (comment)
• ...

Could we please find a way to support slightly longer branch names? 🙏 😍 (For example like so)

Steps to reproduce

1. Contribute to Gitpod
2. Get frustrated 🤬

Workspace affected

No response

Expected behavior

1. Contribute to Gitpod
2. Smooth sailing ⛵

Example repository

https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod

Anything else?

No response

[laushinka]

Steps to reproduce

1. Contribute to Gitpod
2. Get frustrated 🤬

🤣

[mads-hartmann]

@jankeromnes I know this is extremely frustrating. We have previously discussed possible solutions here but as this entire problem will go away once we use VM-based preview environments we had so far prioritised getting that into a shape where we can ship them.

However as the beta deadline has slipped and we won't be able to delete core-dev until all teams have migrated to the Installer I believe it's worth trying to fix this. The team is currently split 3/4 working on VMs and 1/4 (me) trying to "keep the fort". I will close this issue in favour of https://github.com/gitpod-io/ops/issues/1252 as it already has all the context and then move it to the current iteration. However as it's only me and there's already a ton on my plate I can't promise that I'll get to it this week.