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ci: Fix visual and integration test jobs

Mark Florianrequested to merge
fix-visual-and-integration-test-jobs into main

What does this MR do?

ci: Fix visual and integration test jobs

This fixes the CI visual and integration test jobs encountered lately, e.g. in !4446 (merged).

The main issue is that the Playwright and Cypress images don't have a C compiler installed by default, and they use different Node versions (20.15.1 and 20.5.0, respectively) compared to our main Node image (20.16.0). So, the node_modules cache, which is created by the populate_npm_cache job using Node 20.16.0, becomes invalid for some packages. These packages need to be rebuilt to match the current Node version.

This is fixed by ensuring that GCC is installed on all images which run yarn install. The CC environment variable is also removed, since installing GCC automatically sets up a cc symbolic link using the Debian Alternatives system.

This has the downside that those CI jobs are a bit less efficient, as they will be rebuilding those packages each time, rather than using the prepared build cache.

One alternative approach would be to make sure the Node version is consistent across the CI images we use. This doesn't seem viable, though, since we don't have control over the Playwright/Cypress images. We could build our own images, but that seems like too much overhead.

In the future, we could prepare more node_modules caches to cover all the Node versions we use in CI, but again, that seems like more trouble than it's worth, at least for now.

One oddity which isn't explained by all of this is that the Cypress image is on Node 20.5.0, and has been for months. As such, it's not clear why jobs only recently began failing for it.

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Edited by Mark Florian

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