[mapserver-dev] important news item: Travis CI has changed its pricing model

[Jeff McKenna]

On 2020-11-02 2:05 p.m., Even Rouault wrote:
> On lundi 2 novembre 2020 11:21:29 CET Jeff McKenna wrote:
>> Hi devs,
>>
>> It's important to point out that as of today Travis CI has changed its
>> pricing model, so that Open Source projects get a free block of 1000
>> minutes of build time (only about 16 hours), and will have to re-apply
>> to get further blocks of time.   Related blog:
>> https://blog.travis-ci.com/2020-11-02-travis-ci-new-billing
>>
>> To give you an example, I bet I used about 10 hours of build time on
>> MapServer last week myself, yikes.
>>
>> This change also means a move from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com for
>> this, for example:
>>
>>     - see our list of repositories at https://travis-ci.org/github/MapServer
>>     - see how none of our repositories are setup yet at
>> https://travis-ci.com/github/MapServer
>>
>> I have started the process and now have 1000 minutes for my own account
>> on .com but am looking at how to set this up for MapServer and all of
>> our repositories.
>>
>> The knee-jerk reaction to this will be "we need to move to Github
>> Actions/workflows for builds right away", but I think we should examine
>> and discuss all options together before any quick decisions are made for
>> the MapServer 'organization' (Github's term referring to all of
>> MapServer's repositories).
>>
> 
> A theorical alternative would be to see if Travis-CI would accept the
> MapServer organization to share the paid premium plan of the OSGeo
> organization, that is mostly used by GDAL, PROJ and GRASS. But I'm not
> confident they would be willing. And I'm not sure either of the future of the
> current OSGeo premium plan. I wrote to Travis support to see what their
> billing changes would impact and their answer is far from being crystal
> clear... It seems we'd have to choose between concurrency plans or usage based
> plans as defined in https://travis-ci.com/account/plan , but their maximum
> concurrency plans is 5 instead of the 10 we have currently for OSGeo (and
> originally we had 13 when we started on the paid plan). And the usage based
> plan doesn't seem appropriate for open source projects and pull requests
> mechaism as it implies to limit/control the number of users who submit builds
> 

Yes, and it could make sense to actually use our MapServer budget to 
purchase one of the monthly plans for Travis CI builds (if you want my 
opinion this could be very worth it, as I'm all for paying for something 
to keep our architecture stable, instead of jumping to the next 
free-turning-proprietary-turning-paid service).

For example: even the lowest/fewest concurrent job plans on 
travis-ci.com looks like a great option for the MapServer organization:

  - 1 concurrent job = $69/month = $828 yearly
  - 5 concurrent jobs = $249/month = $2,988 yearly

I think spending the $828 out of the MapServer budget each year to have 
a dedicated (and stable) build environment just for the MapServer 
organization is a good plan.  Only 1 concurrent job means that 
technically we can have some developers waiting sometimes, but as most 
times it is me doing the build, and recently the OSS/free Travis CI plan 
now takes ~1 hour to wait for our free build turn before the virtual 
machine spins-up, I think the dedicated instance would be a big 
improvement and even *less* wait times than the current free/OSS plan.

-jeff