[postgis-devel] PSC Vote: Github move from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com - big mess now sorry

[Howard Butler]

> On Sep 30, 2020, at 2:05 PM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sep 30, 2020, at 11:59 AM, Sandro Santilli <strk at kbt.io> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 02:25:56PM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
>>> Okay I may have made a mess of things but I was trying to help Philip (who
>>> manages the postgis-java and postgis-docker repos) on Github. To move those
>>> to travis-ci.com.
>>> 
>>> I've realized I'm way over my head on this Github mess.  I suspect the best
>>> course of action is to move all to travis-ci.com.
>> 
>> How about moving to github actions instead ?
>> It's always proprietary software but better integrated?
> 
> I've come to love the ... understandability? of travis a lot more than GH actions. Travis also feels faster, frankly, which is a big deal when looking for a quick "thumbs up" before merging. 

I've come to love the expressibility of GH actions and the convenience of driving development flow other than simple CI stuff through them. For example, with some of my smaller projects, I've automated the entire release loop including package pushes to things like PyPI tied to release activity in GH. GH actions have lots of value if you're buying into GitHub, which we do for PDAL. Not so much for projects like PostGIS and GEOS which seek to spread development activity over as many platforms as possible.

I've migrated PDAL from Travis/Appveyor => Azure Pipelines => Github actions. The latter is the best because the bus factor of the CI is now shared by the entire project, not just the person with the keys to Travis or AzP, in the same system that's used for push access and all development activity. The other really nice thing about GH actions is *forks* of the main repo also get their actions forked and run. That means people can do CI loops in their own forks with the project's configuration without putting churn load on the main project. I think this is one of the main overlooked benefits of it.

> Maybe if our main repo was github it would be worth the investment of time? 
> Also, the recent addition of different architectures on Travis I've found super comforting (at least in GEOS land) to be able to so easily build out on something not Intel x86.

It is possible to do QEMU builds with docker on GH actions too.  Docker on GH actions is much smoother than Travis IMO.

Another big feather for GH actions is other people's actions, to do everything like mundane stuff like activating a python environment, are shared, addressable, and pinnable within your actions. This means you don't have to replicate rickety piles of shell scripts across every project and can focus on your parts of CI activity that matter. They represent a big CI developer productivity boost that the other platforms haven't been able to replicate because they frankly aren't GitHub. 

Howard

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