Meta: can we fix the link checker?

[tobie]

Currently the link checker fails a number of pull requests for broken links that aren't created by the PR its.f/

Could we either:

• fix it so it only fails links relevant to the PR itself,
• have a process and/or someone in charge of fixing broken links, or
• remove it altogether?

[ljharb]

The second option is typically what’s done - someone has to fix the links in main.

An alternative would be to run it in a cron, instead of on PRs.

[joesepi]

I like the cron option.

[bnb]

Generally in the situation where it's failing, I'd hope we'd not block on that and also open a PR or Issue (even a small one) to note the failure and address it separately :)

AFAIK I don't think the first one is possible with the existing setup. Also, it does currently run on a cron and can be manually run if needed but given that nobody here's aware of that it might not be a good strategy to actually get the issues solved.

[tobie]

Generally in the situation where it's failing, I'd hope we'd not block on that and also open a PR or Issue (even a small one) to note the failure and address it separately :)

Agreed. The cognitive overhead is real, though.

[bnb]

I really wish GitHub provided a mechanism to mark a check as optional in Actions (it was possible in v1, but not v2 unfortunately)

[ljharb]

What do you mean optional - everything's optional unless the branch protections mark it as required, no?

[bnb]

GitHub Actions v1 and GitHub Apps have a third, neutral state that's not pass/fail. GitHub Actions v2 does not (there's an issue that's been open for years and the SDK docs said it's an upcoming feature for just as long IIRC).

[ljharb]

oh woof, that's a real shame it's not well-supported :-/

[bnb]

it's fixed :)

[bnb]

refs: #918 #917

[tobie]

This is again showing up as an issue in pull requests.

The link that's triggering the linter is mistakenly (?) returning 403 despite actually working properly:

curl -I https://thenewstack.io/why-outdated-jquery-is-still-the-dominant-javascript-library/
HTTP/2 403 
date: Wed, 26 Apr 2023 07:28:28 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
cross-origin-embedder-policy: require-corp
cross-origin-opener-policy: same-origin
cross-origin-resource-policy: same-origin
permissions-policy: accelerometer=(),autoplay=(),camera=(),clipboard-read=(),clipboard-write=(),fullscreen=(),geolocation=(),gyroscope=(),hid=(),interest-cohort=(),magnetometer=(),microphone=(),payment=(),publickey-credentials-get=(),screen-wake-lock=(),serial=(),sync-xhr=(),usb=()
referrer-policy: same-origin
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
cf-mitigated: challenge
cache-control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
report-to: {"endpoints":[{"url":"https:\/\/a.nel.cloudflare.com\/report\/v3?s=Y1zUwpBpel8FXK3odvLylazC0gmKUJcWXQT5GFtaTe78T0Z65GDpbUkKYw8Chk4nu9jZcuTWEkYs22MkpyuTQKoLMcGCTb%2FWgbqkF%2FivM%2Bbddrgoyvh6GQLa0L%2BBtJQl"}],"group":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}
nel: {"success_fraction":0,"report_to":"cf-nel","max_age":604800}
server: cloudflare
cf-ray: 7bdd1bef5f2c5a25-MXP
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400, h3-29=":443"; ma=86400

Can we just kill this thing until we have a solution that doesn't interfere with day to day operations?

[joesepi]

Jordan is making link checker non blocking on PRs.

Still would be good to get it on a cron schedule