[Board] Travis-CI & OSGeo

[Regina Obe]

> Hi,

> afaik, Jenkins can be configured, that it uses several "cores" - so one Jenkins instance can take advantage of more servers, so  it scales up pretty well.

> Actually, in my previous work, we used jenkins quite extensively, developers and even power users were able to setup their own jobs, 
> which were taking fresh code from custom git repo ... it was more or less about writing the shell script, which did all the work

> so, if there would be jenkins instance available in osgeo infrastructure, I would prefer it over travis (which pywps is using now)


Yes Jenkins can scale fairly well especially when we throw slaves into the mix.
I was more thinking about the logistics of delegating administrative rights and configuring slaves in a fashion that power users can configure their own and know what's available on each slave for their tests, cleanup of workspace etc.
And also the interoperability of the projects.

The main reason I like Jenkins is for PostGIS work we need to follow PostgreSQL developments which means we need to test against the head of not yet released PostgreSQL which is something not easy to do with travis.

We also need to test against the head of GEOS and GDAL so one of the Jenkins bots we have uses the build output from PostgreSQL, GEOS, GDAL Jenkins jobs and does a matrix job (testing 5 versions of PostgreSQL including dev head) , GEOS head, GDAL head. 

There is a lot of potential for synergy, but also a bit of "If I need to test GDAL for PostGIS purposes and GDAL needs to test GDAL, but I don't necessarily need to run all the tests GDAL needs to run, where is the balance of power there".  So that's my reasoning for why a single Jenkins might not be sufficient.  It's doable but takes a bit of planning.

As far as authentication we can use OSGeo LDAP and designate administrators from each project.  I think having 10 administrators that have full control of the instance from various projects that we all feel comfortable about working together is a workable solution.


Thanks,
Regina