Remove broken and unused stats workflows #1603
Merged
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Motivation
The "arduino-stats" GitHub Actions workflow was designed to periodically gather download statistics from Arduino CDN and push results to Datadog (a46f36a).
The recorded stats from the identical system in the Arduino CLI repository showed a periodic decrease in total download count. Since this is patently impossible, it is clear that something is wrong with the system and that the recorded data is not trustworthy. An investigation into the problem was never done.
On 2022-03-14, the runs of the "arduino-stats" GitHub Actions workflow began to fail:
Because there had not been any relevant change in the repository between the last successful run and the first failing run, it seems likely that some external change caused the breakage.
Since the "arduino-stats" workflow was not ever working successfully and there was never an investigation about that, nor any investigation or impact resulting from the last 6 months of failed workflow runs, it is clear the stats are not of any value.
The "github-stats" GitHub Actions workflow periodically gathers GitHub release asset download statistics for Arduino CLI and pushes the results to Datadog.
There are no known problems with the "github-stats" workflow. However, GitHub stats are not very valuable on their own as they only provide an unknown fraction of the total downloads of Arduino IDE. So there is no point in keeping this workflow after the "arduino-stats" workflow is removed. As with the data from the "arduino-stats" workflow, this information has never ended up being used.
Both workflows use deprecated Node.js 12 runtime-based actions:
https://github.blog/changelog/2022-09-22-github-actions-all-actions-will-begin-running-on-node16-instead-of-node12/
and
set-output
workflow commands:https://github.blog/changelog/2022-10-11-github-actions-deprecating-save-state-and-set-output-commands/
These currently result in warnings printed to the workflow run summary page, but will eventually cause the complete breakage of the workflow.
Change description
Remove the broken infrastructure from the repository rather than investing time into fixing and maintaining something that isn't being used anyway.
Other information
Fixes #971
The workflows were removed from the Arduino CLI repository last April without any detrimental affect:
Reviewer checklist