reprotest: inadvertent misconfiguration in salsa-ci config

[Chris Lamb]

Hi James,

Great post, thank you. So, I'm in two minds re. the way forward:

> * Update reprotest to handle a single-disabled-varations-value as a
>   special case - treating it as vary and/or emitting a warning.

On whether to magically/transparently fix this, needless to say, it's
considered bad practice to change the behaviour of software that has
already been released — I would, as a rule, subscribe to that idea.
However, we should bear in mind that this idea revolves around what
users are *expecting*, not necessarily what the software actually
does.

I say that because I hazard that all 400 usages are indeed expecting
that `--variations=-foo` functions the same as `--variations=all,-foo`
(or `--vary=-foo`), and so this proposed change would merely be
modifying reprotest to reflect their existing expectations. It would
not therefore be a violation of the "don't break existing
functionality" dictum.

(Saying that, the addition of a warning that we are doing so would
definitely not go amiss.)

> * Treat removal of a variance factor from an already-empty-context
> as an error.

I'm also tempted by this as well. :)  How would this be experienced by
most DDs? Would their new pushes to Salsa now suddenly fail in the
reprotest job of the pipeline? If so, that's not too awful, given that
the prominent error message would presumably let them know precisely
how to fix it.


Best wishes,

-- 
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    ⬋   ⬊      Chris Lamb
   o     o     reproducible-builds.org 💠
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