[gdal-dev] YAML, AppVeyor and the perks of continuous integration (Re: Willing to Pay for Help Building GDAL 3 on WIndows)

[Raphael Das Gupta]

On 28.05.19 06:29, CDelancy wrote:
> Unfortunately, I had never heard of a .yml file before your post and I would
> not know what to do with what you have linked. My attempts to research it
> haven't yielded anything useful.
.yml is one of the file extensions for the text-based YAML 
data-serialization language <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML>. (The 
other one being .yaml)

It is usually used for configuration files of various kinds that have to 
be parsed by software but should also be as readable as possible for humans.

AppVeyor <https://www.appveyor.com/> is a continuous integration 
service, that is, it can be made to automatically build software from 
source and/or to execute linting and other checks or functional tests on 
it. Because the steps needed differ from one software project to 
another, they need to be configurable. That configuration is done in YAML.

The GDAL and PROJ.4 projects also seems to use that service. And as the 
builds there are known to work (they run regularly and people get 
notified when they break and will usually try to fix them ASAP), the 
steps as configured in the respective YAML files are worth trying when 
you try to build them yourself.

Because the YAML syntax is inspired by well-known and easy-to-comprehend 
conventions (similar e.g. to how bullet lists are represented in 
plaintext emails or other plaintext documents), you don't even need to 
really know the YAML file format to understand most of the configuration 
content. (I.e., understand what the build steps are command-wise. What 
each step does in detail or when and why it is needed might of course 
need more knowledge to understand.)

Good luck and kind regards,
Raphael

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