[ANNOUNCE] First step toward "gating" Gitlab testing

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

The Gitlab test infrastructure for Xen has come a long way since its
inception. It has become a critical part of the Xen community
infrastructure.

As a first step toward the goal of making Gitlab tests gating (a failed
test blocks commits from entering the "master" branch), the committers
will soon start to commit patches to a git tree under
gitlab.com/xen-project rather than xenbits.xenproject.org. The change
will take effect at the very beginning of the 4.19 release cycle. The
Gitlab tree is [1] https://gitlab.com/xen-project/hardware/xen. (In case
of changes to the new Gitlab repository name, we'll provide an update.)

It will be a change for committers, but what does change for everyone
else?

If you are not a committer, nothing will change. The Xen tree on Xenbits
[2] git://xenbits.xenproject.org/xen.git will be kept up-to-date. The
committers will commit to "staging" on Gitlab [1], then a script will
automatically update "staging" on Xenbits [2].

Thus, you can continue to git fetch from your usual git source. OSSTest
will still run after the Xenbits tree [2] is updated and will still be
responsible for pushing to the "master" branch on success, the same as
today.

At first, the Gitlab test pipeline [1] will run in parallel to OSSTest.
As a follow-up step, we plan to run the Gitlab test pipeline before
updating "staging" on Xenbits, thus saving OSSTest bandwidth in case of
failures and keeping the Xen git history of "staging" cleaner. More
details will be provided at that time.

Stay tuned!

Cheers,

Stefano