Avoid running Maven in PT CI jobs

[MiguelWeezardo]

Description

ptl executes run-launcher which uses Maven to find current Trino version.
This has the downside of trying to download Maven plugins, and fails if Maven Central is down.

Example: https://github.com/trinodb/trino/actions/runs/3409303066/jobs/5671117481

These scripts should be run by developers, not by CI where only one Trino is available.

Non-technical explanation

Avoid Maven in product tests to protect from Maven Central outages.

Release notes

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# Section
* Fix some things. ({issue}`issuenumber`)

[findepi]

These scripts should be run by developers, not by CI where only one Trino is available.

The CI should ensure these scripts do still work, since people depend on them.

Can we fix the Maven Central problem without removing coverage?

[nineinchnick]

We still call it in the build-pt job

[hashhar]

We still call it in the build-pt job

I don't think so. This was the only usage.

[nineinchnick]

It runs the .github/bin/build-pt-matrix-from-impacted-connectors.py script:
https://github.com/trinodb/trino/blob/master/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L879

which in turn uses the PTL launcher:
https://github.com/trinodb/trino/blob/master/.github/bin/build-pt-matrix-from-impacted-connectors.py#L64

PTL is used to describe suites to get the list of features configured in their test environments. This only happens in PRs. On master, when the list of impacted modules is empty, this script doesn't call PTL and just converts the matrix from YAML to JSON.

[hashhar]

Thanks for the link, I was looking in ci.yml only.

[MiguelWeezardo]

It runs the .github/bin/build-pt-matrix-from-impacted-connectors.py script: https://github.com/trinodb/trino/blob/master/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L879

which in turn uses the PTL launcher: https://github.com/trinodb/trino/blob/master/.github/bin/build-pt-matrix-from-impacted-connectors.py#L64

PTL is used to describe suites to get the list of features configured in their test environments. This only happens in PRs. On master, when the list of impacted modules is empty, this script doesn't call PTL and just converts the matrix from YAML to JSON.

This means our CI pipeline will still fail when Maven Central is down, so this PR didn't achieve much.
Perhaps instead of trying to avoid the dependency on Maven Central we should add more public repos, and hope they don't all go down at once?

[nineinchnick]

This means our CI pipeline will still fail when Maven Central is down, so this PR didn't achieve much.

Not necessarily. build-pt calls Maven but it also restores the Maven cache so there's a high chance it won't actually try to fetch that testng 5.10 jars.

The jobs that actually execute product tests use artifacts prepared by build-pt and don't need to call Maven at all.

[hashhar]

Re: adding mirrors it was something which came up in recent discussion - if we still notice issues with Maven (with the cache solution) we should consider adding Google's mirror and maybe if GitHub has a mirror (it would be super-fast) to settings.xml on CI.