Discussing a minimal CARLA Content baseline for GitHub Actions CI (branch ue5-dev)

[JArmandoAnaya]

I opened this discussion to continue the conversation from issue #9722 about the current GitHub Actions workflow and the way CARLA Content resources are downloaded for CI validation.

The issue suggests reconsidering whether GitHub Actions should always download the latest state of the ue5-dev branch from the Bitbucket carla-content repository, or whether the CI should instead rely on a smaller and more stable content baseline.

Context

The current workflow appears to download CARLA Content resources from the ue5-dev branch in the Bitbucket carla-content repository. Since this branch continues receiving content updates, the CI may end up downloading and processing more resources than are strictly required to validate a pull request.

This can make the CI pipeline take a very long time to complete. In some cases, the full execution may take close to five hours, with a significant portion of the time spent downloading and processing heavy map resources.

Discussion proposal

I would like to open the discussion around whether CARLA should define a minimal and stable content baseline for GitHub Actions CI.

One possible approach would be to pin the workflow to a specific commit of the CARLA Content repository that contains only the minimum required resources, for example the assets needed for Town10HD. This could make CI runs more reproducible and reduce the amount of data downloaded during each execution.

Another possible approach would be to keep a small fixed set of base simulator resources for CI and manage additional maps as optional resources, similar to how this was handled in previous CARLA versions.

Questions for discussion

• Should GitHub Actions always validate against the latest ue5-dev content from Bitbucket?
• Would it be better to pin CARLA Content to a known commit for CI reproducibility?
• Could Town10HD or another minimal map/content set be enough for regular pull request validation?
• Should additional maps be treated as optional resources outside the default CI workflow?
• Is GitHub Actions the right place to validate the download and processing of the latest full content resources?

Expected benefit

The goal is not to remove validation of CARLA Content, but to reconsider whether every regular CI run needs to depend on the latest and full content state.

A smaller and fixed CI content baseline could help reduce execution time, improve reproducibility, and make pull request validation more efficient while still allowing full content validation to happen in a more appropriate workflow if needed.

Related issue: #9722

[LuisPovedaCano]

Thanks for bringing this up. This is valuable feedback, and we are definitely taking it into account.

We agree that the current CI setup is not ideal for every kind of contribution, and we are already discussing possible ways to improve it moving forward.

We still need to evaluate the details and what would be sustainable for the project long term, so we cannot share a concrete plan yet, but this is absolutely something we want to improve.

Thanks again for the feedback and for taking the time to discuss it.

[JArmandoAnaya]

Thank you so much for your consideration. I hope you can find a good solution to this problem soon. 👋