"Staging" industrial_ci?

[130s]

Gitlab CI allows staging to split CI jobs per e.g. build, test, deploy. This sounds quite convenient in many ways. I haven't looked into if other CI platform has this feature.

To utilize this I think we have to at least split our procedure in industrial_ci/src/tests/source_tests.sh, provide an api to selectively run each CI step.

[130s]

This may be already noted in #98. If it is, then that proves this isn't a bad idea :)

[mathias-luedtke]

This is rather tricky to accomplish, due to using Docker and making it work for all the different tests we have.
It would require a major refactoring and in the end we will end up with something that works like the ROS prerelase tests.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of stages, but it might be hard to make this backwards-compatible.
And it bloats the CI config files.

PS: Travis started to support stages (beta) as well.

[frapit]

Since this is still an open issue and stages or similar concepts are supported by Gitlab, Travis and Github for a while now I would like to ask if there are plans to pursue this further.
I think one can get similar functionality by building first using NOT_TEST_BUILD and PYLINT_CHECK and commiting the container after each "stage" to reuse the build cache later. This seems to be a bit hacky and I would prefer a cleaner solution.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of stages, but it might be hard to make this backwards-compatible.
And it bloats the CI config files.

Is the consequence that we don't want stages or is this obsolete? What would need to be refactored to support this? Thanks!