Duration of package checking

[maucejo]

Description

Hi all,

I have submitted an update of my template elsearticle. However, I am concerned with the duration of the "Typst package check" that runs since about a day, while the "Test PR" is finished and OK. Is there a problem with the package check system ? I may misunderstood how it works, but I thought it is somewhat an automatic process.

Thank you for you answer.

[quachpas]

I think the package check was just not reported as completed. It doesn't take more than a few minutes.

[maucejo]

I think the package check was just not reported as completed. It doesn't take more than a few minutes.

I agree that it doesn't take more than few minutes, but the check is still in progress since more than a day. I wonder whether it is preferable to delete the PR and resubmitted or to just wait.

What do you think @quachpas ?

[quachpas]

You can amend your commit then force push with lease, that should clear it up

[elegaanz]

To explain what is happening with these long running checks: the hosting provider we use for the review bot has a known bug that kills services for seemingly random reason (there is probably an underlying issue, but I wasn't able to find it after a bit of investigation, and the support team of the said hosting provider is not really willing to spend time on that issue, since not so many people are affected).
The procedure to display checks on GitHub can be seen a three different steps: tell GitHub that you started the check suite (it will then display the yellow circle and say that the check suite is running), actually run the tests, report back to GitHub (either with a success message, or a list of errors and warnings, that will be displayed in the GitHub UI). The second step obviously takes the most time, but in our case it's generally 20sec to 30sec long. However, because the service is killed and restarted so often, it happens quite frequently that the process is interrupted in the middle of this step, preventing the final report to be sent to GitHub. Because the review bot is stateless, it can't resume its work if restarted, so it looks like the check is still running from GitHub's side, even if nothing is actually being done.

Force pushing should indeed trigger the CI again, but there is no guarantee that it will not get killed in the middle again, so you may have to try a few times. The situation is really not great, and I apologize for that. A better solution is to run typst-package-check locally before submitting your PR.

Because there is no way to make the current infrastructure work (other than migrating to another hosting provider, which we won't do), the plan was to convert the review bot to a regular GitHub action, which may take a bit more time to run, but should not get killed in the middle of its work. It was just not a priority so far, but I hope to find some time to work on it during the coming weeks.

[maucejo]

Thank you for the detail answer. I will try what you suggest.

[DJDuque]

A better solution is to run typst-package-check locally before submitting your PR.

@maucejo You can also run it as part of your own CI. See my attempt to get some inspiration (I'm open to improvements), which I think should work OK once typst/package-check#28 is fixed.

[elegaanz]

We migrated the checks to run in a GitHub Action.