Re-enable static builds in CI

[rgov]

@andrewvaughanj disabled static builds in #368. This bug tracks re-enabling them once the issue is resolved.

[TrevorHansen]

@rgov fixed this in 4ab147c

[aytey]

Erm, didn't that commit just "clean-up" our Dockerfile? Is this actually used in CI? The GitHub Actions CI does not use "our" Dockerfile:

• stp/.github/workflows/ci.yml

  Line 16 in 644d43a

  runs-on: [ubuntu-latest]

I don't think we have a static build in CI still.

[aytey]

(@TrevorHansen if I'm wrong, feel free to close this again 🙈 )

[TrevorHansen]

Ah, yes, you're right about it just being Docker, not CI, that's static now.

Is the plan to have a static and dynamic CI build? With just testing on the dynamic?

[aytey]

If we could test and build via Actions for both static and dynamic, that would be great. However, if we're worried about running out of free minutes (I don't actually know how many we get), then I guess just building statically and testing dynamically is good enough for me.

[TrevorHansen]

Hmm. The static build currently disables the python interface, and the python interface is required for testing. So getting testing of the static working will require changes to the build script. It seems a pain unless it's useful to have the python interface working with a static build?

In the short term. To get a static build in CI, the easiest seems to be to edit the Docker file to pull STP from git, then use git actions to trigger a docker build. Would that be OK, or is it better to do it entirely within github actions?

I hadn't thought about the free minutes before. We'll save about half of our minutes if we schedule the codeQL generation - to say once a month. Is anyone using it? Perhaps you @msoos ?

[aytey]

The static build currently disables the python interface, and the python interface is required for testing. So getting testing of the static working will require changes to the build script.

I'm not sure that's true ... some of the tests use Python, but only the Python API tests need us to build the Python interface.

For example, the "query file" tests should run fine without having the Python interface enabled, but they do need a system Python to be able to run.

At least, that's my understanding of it.

Would that be OK, or is it better to do it entirely within github actions?

If you want to assign this to me, I can try to take a look at getting a static build as part of a GitHub Action working this week. Hopefully it should be straightforward, now that the GitHub Actions branch has been merged.

[TrevorHansen]

Thanks @aytey . It'd be nice to have a static build in the CI. Setting up testing on it seems harder to me, but if you'd like to, it'd certainly be better.