Skip building wheels if no release files have changed

[Eric-Arellano]

The time we really need to run these jobs is when we're doing release prep, which means we will have changed notes/ and, sometimes, VERSION.

We also run the jobs if we've made changes to our release process.

As with Rust skips, developers can ignore this skip by manually changing their commit message.

[jsirois]

Yay!

[Eric-Arellano]

Only test failure is the flaky test now skipped. Merging.

[benjyw]

So this actually means we can't easily run Pants at any SHA any more?

[Eric-Arellano]

So this actually means we can't easily run Pants at any SHA any more?

Two possible remedies:

1. Have the PR author leave off [ci skip-build-wheels] in the merge message to force building the wheels.
2. Change the logic to always build on branch builds, no matter what.

Would #1 be sufficient? It would both reduce the CI backload and reduce our usage in S3 pretty dramatically.

[jsirois]

So this actually means we can't easily run Pants at any SHA any more?

I think this was clarified on Slack, but "easily" is deceptive. Its easy to run pants from any sha, its just slow since the engoine needs to recompile. Is that right? So we're talking about speed inconvenience, not that its hard actually run pants without prebuilt wheels / pexes.

[benjyw]

So this actually means we can't easily run Pants at any SHA any more?

I think this was clarified on Slack, but "easily" is deceptive. Its easy to run pants from any sha, its just slow since the engoine needs to recompile. Is that right? So we're talking about speed inconvenience, not that its hard actually run pants without prebuilt wheels / pexes.

Yes, it's pretty much about scripting it up to make it straightforward to build pants and then use it in your repo, I guess.

[stuhood]

2. Change the logic to always build on branch builds, no matter what.

This is what I thought would be happening here. We should continue to build+upload wheels for any branch/tag commits.

[benjyw]

1. Change the logic to always build on branch builds, no matter what.

This is what I thought would be happening here. We should continue to build+upload wheels for any branch/tag commits.

Why?

[stuhood]

@benjyw : To allow for consuming them for testing using the infrastructure that you added yesterday. It's incredibly useful.