Perhaps we should establish first whether the proposal in #46122 is in the right direction before discussing the specifics of this PR.

My impression is that draft PRs are usually (always?) in an incomplete state, where spending the necessary resources to run all the checks is not providing enough value. At least the draft PRs created by the Chromium exporter are almost certain to go through some further revisions before being ready to land in Chromium, never mind upstream. Are the workflows of other bots and users different that warrant the resource cost of running all the checks in draft state?

Oh, this is about export, not import. I think I misunderstood that.

I personally use draft PRs a lot specifically in order to run CI checks on complex or speculative changes before requesting review. So disabling CI entirely for draft PRs would break that workflow.

The gecko exporter doesn't create a PRs in draft mode (although it could), but it also doesn't create a PR at all until the change is on autoland, so the most common case is that no changes are made after the PR is created, and so it's reasonably efficient. Also, if the CI is run while the patches are on autoland it's possible that failures are noticed and fixed before the patches reach central (although I don't know how often that happens in practice).

The issue here seems to be that the Chromium exporter is creating PRs long before the patches are ready to land, and running CI on those is inefficient. I think the question here is what workflow you want on the Chromium side. If people are never looking at the CI results before the patch lands, could you defer creating the PRs? Or if they sometimes look, or look after a certain point in the lifecycle, what signal could we use to start running CI at that point?

We could, with some effort, build a system where draft PRs only run CI when they have a particular label (or don't run CI if they have a particular label, which the Chrome exporter could set by default).

As discussed offline we implemented a change in the Chromium exporter that should reduce resource consumption from PRs that are not yet ready. I'll close this.