Add a prow job blacklist

[Katharine]

Sometimes I would like to be able to disable a bunch of prowjobs for infrastructure reasons (e.g. #15854). However, while finding the jobs may be relatively easy, actually disabling the jobs is difficult, because it requires editing large numbers of jobs, which may then fail tests because they're auto-generated, etc. Undoing the change may then also be a pain.

It would be easier to be able to just edit a list of jobs that prow should refuse to start under any circumstances.

/area prow

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[BenTheElder]

@cjwagner thoughts?

[cjwagner]

Is the only benefit of this that we can disable periodic jobs without losing the history of when the last run was? Deleting jobs from config seems equally as difficult as declaring a blacklist.

[BenTheElder]

It's not equally difficult for sharded jobs I guess? E.g. a broke presubmit?

…

On Fri, May 1, 2020, 12:04 Cole Wagner ***@***.***> wrote: Is the only benefit of this that we can disable periodic jobs without losing the history of when the last run was? Deleting jobs from config seems equally as difficult as declaring a blacklist. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#15856 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAHADKZG4RKTT3NFI3C5EDDRPMMKPANCNFSM4KFLYAVA> .

[cjwagner]

Thats fair, but it still seems like it would be pretty easy to just delete all the shards? I don't change job config as much or at as large a scale as you or Katharine so I haven't really run into this pain point myself.

We could add a blacklist to the Prow config and make Tide, Horologium, and the trigger plugin respect it, but I'm wondering how helpful this would actually be so we can prioritize it against other work.

[BenTheElder]

I haven't actually needed this recently, and i'm not sure how much it would have helped in the past.

let's close it for now.