[Board] Travis-CI & OSGeo

[Even Rouault]

On mardi 1 mai 2018 12:22:26 CEST Howard Butler wrote:
> On 5/1/18 2:39 AM, Regina Obe wrote:
> > I'm sure Hobu will correct my ignorance and rave about all the goodness of
> > Travis :)
> My point(s) about Travis are not about its technical non-superiority.

I would not be able to articulate things more clearly than Howard did and due to his 
experience on this very precise topic, the value of his testimony should be be considered with 
care.

Due to lack of recent experience with Jenkins, I can't really comment if it is appropriate for 
the task. I think it can trigger builds on pull requests, can't it ? What about configuration of 
builds: is there the equivalent of a config file hosted in the source code repo (ala .travis.yml) 
to which any contributor can contribute changes to the CI scripts: fix them, add new 
configurations, etc ? If it is a task that can only be done by a select administrator of each 
project, then we add extra burden on its shoulders.
But the above is just details compared to a more fundamental difference when comparing 
Jenkins to Travis-CI/CircleCI/GitLab-CI/etc... Jenkins is just a software. Which machines would 
run it ? Has OSGeo a stock of 20 unused cores somewhere to support 10 concurrent builds ?
I don't really believe either in solutions where people bring their machines. I think that was 
how buildbot worked with the build slaves, right ?
My mention of having sufficiently hardware power is not just a theoretical concern: ironically 
a lot of flakes I've seen with GDAL and Travis were due to the GDAL autotest suite doing the 
mundane task of downloading (small) files from download.osgeo.org and the server being 
unresponsive due to probably being overloaded by other tasks. I've finally modified those 
tests to pull from rawcontent.github.com and those flakes have gone away.

And even if you have the appropriate software + the appropriate machines, the crucial 
human factor as raised by Howard remains. I feel my time is better spent at taking care at the 
sofware I'm knowleadgable of rather than at doing system administration/maintainance 
work for which I've little expertise/interest, and which implies to be available at the moment 
when things break.

Even

-- 
Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
http://www.spatialys.com
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