Limit scope of CI runs

[quantumjot]

All CI jobs run for all changes, including simple updates to documentation. This is probably overkill.

Could consider limiting which jobs are run for certain types of changes, e.g. exclude documentation changes (README etc) from code linting/tests.

[acocac]

@quantumjot we discussed it yesterday with @ots22 and @miquelmassot. Indeed all-contributors config file allow skipping CI, see below:

https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/scivision/blob/77139ef9bd03b9011969914170ff254d2bb111f9/.all-contributorsrc#L110

Hope @ots22 can provide his views in how to optimise CI jobs run.

[quantumjot]

Cool. I've done this before using the GH workflow and paths-ignore to include the README etc..

[ots22]

I guess this came out of all the updates to the contributor list.

One issue is that we have a branch protection rule for main requiring the build checks to pass - but skipping them means they never do! A rule that results in them passing but not doing anything in some cases seems dangerous to me.

We also tried something like this: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/scivision/pull/292 but it didn't seem all that convincing.

We could alternatively consider another branch without the protection (either develop, or convince all-contributors to open its PRs somewhere else and merge them all together).

[quantumjot]

One issue is that we have a branch protection rule for main requiring the build checks to pass

Aha - I see. OK, well this seems like a more complex problem than I initially thought. My comment wasn't specifically about the contributor bot, but seeing the whole codebase get tested when there's a small change to a README etc, seems like overkill.

Feel free to close this if the issue is described elsewhere BTW!

[edwardchalstrey1]

Going to close this one for now, feel free to reopen