Currently the tooling supports skipping packages via yaml files that contain a flat list of excluded packages. This works well, and has substantially improved the situation over trying to maintain it manually in .cirrus.yaml.

However, we've had a number of cases where we want to exclude a package only for a specific channel, usually because either a package is deliberately becoming master-only temporarily, or because it's impossible to run a specific set of tests on one channel for some reason. Our de-facto solution for that to embed conditional logic in .cirrus.yaml (like this), which is annoying to get right and scales poorly.

Some options:

• Don't change the tooling, but make exclude_foo_master.yaml and exclude_foo_stable.yaml files (one of which would be empty) and pass exclude_foo.yaml,exclude_foo_$CHANNEL.yaml in the script.
  • This would be slightly cumbersome, but doesn't add any new tooling.
• Change the format of the YAML files to include channel-specific exclusions. E.g., change the current list to a dictionary where the keys are lists of channels (with empty meaning all channels).
  • This would require a way to get the channel into the script. If we go this route we should add a flag to use (--channel=$CHANNEL) since picking up env variables automagically inside the script makes things much harder to understand.