On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 06:55:28AM -0700, '[email protected]' via sage-devel 
wrote:
> The biggest issue with the reliability of the CI is a deep design
> decision in the way the tests are setup. Many doctests have an
> inherent random element, and this is mostly on purpose to increase
> the surface of code paths that are tested and thereby discover new
> bugs. The disadvantage is that unfortunately some test runs will
> produce failures that are not connected to the changes of the PR.
> ...

I know nothing about the internal implementation here, but just this
description suggests a change in practice: when a test on a PR fails,
rerun that test on the existing branch (without the pull request) with
the same random seed to see if it also fails there. If it does, then
automatically file a separate issue.

(I see potential issues with different numbers of random numbers being
used pre- and post-PR, but there are also ways to mitigate that, eg
maintaining a separate random seed used only for generating test
cases.)

--Dylan

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