Documentation-only changes and CI

Development Compiler
1

i recently made a minor editorial change to a file in the /docs directory of the compiler repo and reflexively ran the 'smoke tests' on the associated PR. i was a bit pained to find that it took roughly 11 hours (in aggregate) to complete the CI jobs for this, which made me wonder:

  1. are documentation-only changes required to go through CI as a matter of policy, or can someone with commit access use their discretion to merge such changes directly?
  2. is the CI infrastructure sophisticated enough to skip most of its work if a change doesn't (or shouldn't) affect build artifacts?
2

All changes are supposed to go through PR testing, although the Build Wrangler (whoever that is at any given time) and one or two other people are able to force-merge PRs without waiting.

The CI infrastructure is not, at present, able to determine what it needs to build or test and will run a complete build and test every time. You can ask for a "smoke test" instead of a full "test", which will typically take rather less time.

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