How is this meme related to the context?

Ha, losers - tests can't fail if you don't have any tests.

…it’s okay on rare and understood cases. (Why else would you be able to merge if it’s failing.)

Sure, but do you want to risk catastrophy as a way to filter out bad developers?

I mean what's the point of your test if they fail. It's already bad enough that one of our test is flacky. To be fair I am working in a company that does a lot of system safety and a lot of our stuff isn't just tested, it's mathematicaly proven.

Shit! You got deadlines, and managers or customers piling in? Yeah, they don’t pass, but who cares! The code works….probably! Ship it!

This is dumb as fuck.

We have a few non-required checks here and there - mostly as you need an admin to list a check as required and that can be annoying to do. And we still get code merged in occasionally that fails those checks. Hell, I have merged in code that fails the checks. Sometimes checks take a while to run, and there is this nice merge when ready button in GH. But it will gladly merge your code in once all the required checks have passed ignoring any non-required checks.

And it is such a useful button to have, especially in a large codebase with lots of developers - just merge in the code when it is ready and avoid forgetting about things for a few hours and possibly having to rebase and run all the checks again because of some minor merge conflict...

But GH required checks are just broken for large code bases as well. We don't always want to run every check on every code change. We don't need to run all unit tests when only a documentation has changed. But required checks are all or nothing. They need to return something or else you cannot merge at all (though this might apply to external checks more then gh actions maybe). I really wish there was a require all checks to pass and a at least one check must run. Or if external checks could tell GH when they are required or not. Either way there is a lot of room for improvement on the GH PR checks.

Would you look at that - the pipeline is green now! Quick everybody, merge your stuff while it's stable (/s) (sadly a true story tho)

Why write tests when you should be writing more features the business needs now but will never use?

There are definitely ways to run partial testing suites on modified code only. I feel like much of what you're complaining about is an already solved problem.

If you only write tests for things that won't fail, you're doing it wrong. Are you anticipating some other feature coming soon? Write a failing test for it. Did you find untested code that might run soon with a little work? Write a test for it. Did a nonessential feature break while adding an essential feature, let the test fail and fix it later.

a bug? No problem we will just fix it in the next release. loop for eternity.

This just sounds like "my frontend only changes shouldn't be impacted by some dumbass breaking backend two commits ago", which seems reasonable.

Bro just crash the CI because the linter found an extra space bro trust me bro this is important. Also Unit tests are optional.

Eww, no. You're doing tests wrong. The point of tests is to understand whether changes to the code (or dependencies) break any functionality. If you have failing tests, it makes this task very difficult and time consuming for people who need it most, i.e. people new to the project. "Is this test failing because of something I've done? <half an hour of debugging later> Oh, it was broken before my changes too!". If you insist on adding broken tests, mark them as "expected to fail" at least, so that they don't affect the overall test suite result (and when someone fixes the functionality they have to un-mark them as expected to fail), and the checkmark is green. You should never merge PRs/MRs which fail any tests - it is an extremely bad habit and forms a bad culture in your project.

The real problem is merging before waiting for that one slow CI pipeline to complete

It can be finicky to set up and mistakes can be made easily. Often you have to manually replicate the entire internal dependency tree of your project in the checks so that there are no false positive test results. There are some per-language solutions, and there's Nix which is almost built for this sort of thing, but both come with drawbacks as well.

Yeah there are ways to run partial tests on modified code only. But they interact poorly with GH required checks. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/44490 goes into a lot more detail on similar problems people are having with GH actions - though our problem is with external CICD tools that report back to GH. Though it does look like they have updated the docs that are linked to in that discussion so maybe something has recently changed with GH actions - but I bet it still exists for external tooling.

One problem is GHs auto-merge when ready button. It will merge when there are still tests running unless they are required. It would be much better if the auto merges took into account all checks and not just required ones.