Using workflow-dispatch to separate third-party integration tests, e.g. for Quarkus, from main code repo

[zakkak]

Hello all,

Today I came across [1] and thought that maybe we could use this to move the biggest part of quarkus GH workflow outside the oracle/graal and graalvm/mandrel repositories.

Some of the benefits I see in doing this are the following:

1. Reduce noise on code history and repos
2. Maintain the major parts of the workflow in a single place (right now we have one copy in oracle/graal and three in graalvm/mandrel)
3. Make it more scalable and allow integration tests for other frameworks to be added more easily

I see no drawbacks so far!
What do you think?

[1] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/workflow-dispatch

[zakkak]

The main idea is that workflow-dispatch allows you to trigger a CI on another repo and also pass different inputs to it. So whenever graal GH CI runs it can trigger the Quarkus workflow and the same can be done by mandrel. The integration tests will actually run on the "integrations-tests" repo and not in graal or mandrel repos.

To achieve the above we would need to create a new repository under graalvm. Something like "graalvm/graal-integration-test-workflows".

[zakkak]

This is now implemented in https://github.com/graalvm/mandrel/actions/workflows/base.yml