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[stephenfin]

Useful breadcrumb for people who do not touch openshift/release as often as they probably should.

This is half-baked. I'm mainly pushing to see if it's a good idea. If it is, I'll flesh it out more/do it better (TM).

[openshift-ci]

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This pull-request has been approved by: stephenfin
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[openshift-ci]

@stephenfin: The following tests failed, say /retest to rerun all failed tests or /retest-required to rerun all mandatory failed tests:

Test name	Commit	Details	Required	Rerun command
ci/prow/security	d6834b8	link	false	/test security
ci/prow/breaking-changes	d6834b8	link	false	/test breaking-changes
ci/prow/integration	d6834b8	link	true	/test integration
ci/prow/unit	d6834b8	link	true	/test unit

Full PR test history. Your PR dashboard.

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[smg247]

@stephenfin, I appreciate the attempt to make it more clear, but this isn't something that we will want to do. The file actually can be edited by hand, and there are many usecases for doing so. Individual jobs are generated by prowgen, but even those are tolerant of specific manual changes. This comment will be more confusing than helpful, I think

[stephenfin]

@smg247 Apologies, I missed your response. I wasn't aware that you could modify these by hand. Is that possible in openshift/release or are you talking about other places that prowgen is used (are there any)? For openshift/release, I had assumed the generated-config job (i.e. the hack/validate-generated-config.sh script) and other related jobs like ordered-prow-config would prevent this.

Happy to close this of course, but before I do, I'll ask would it make sense to add an alternative note? Ideally something like the below that would provide helpful breadcrumbs to newer contributors?

# This file was initially auto-generated by prowgen from the following sources:
# 
# <path/to/config/file/a>
# <path/to/config/file/b>
# ...
#
# You can modify this by hand, but you may need to run prowgen after the fact to
# ensure conflicts are not introduced.

(assuming we even have the context at this stage of the pipeline to populate this list, of course).

It's a totally different problem and totally different toolkit, but the storage folks do something like this in openshift/csi-operator and it is indeed very helpful at the outset.