[Qgis-developer] CI testing: the straight truth

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi René-Luc, hi all,

This is something I have been afraid of for a couple of weeks.

Short story: our builds just grew too big and a full build is taking
more than 50 minutes to complete on the travis infrastructure. What
keeps us alive at the moment is the persistent ccache so a full build
actually never happens. If the ccache gets lost, we will need some black
magic to get the builds started again (it's possible to slowly get the
cache warm but not straightforward).

What we could possibly do:

 - Modularize the build: e.g. astyle could very well be moved to a
   separate job along with other static checks like spelling. That would
   even have the advantage of a faster feedback for these analyses.
   But I'm not sure how much time we can actually get out of that.

 - Move dependencies into separate packages. We have some deps like
   qspatialite that are built as part of QGIS which I think could be
   installed as dependencies from a .deb. This will require quite a bit
   of work: moving travis out of the container based infrastructure to
   the sudo-enabled infrastructure, setting up a repo (e.g. ppa) with
   all sort of dependencies including qt 5 etc. This would be an option
   again since travis enabled caching also on sudo systems recently.
   This will be a quite large task to do.

 - Move to another system (managed infrastructure or self-hosted, there
   are a couple of services like circle ci, drone.io, jenkins, gitlab
   ci ...).
   This will be a quite large task to do with the risk that we run into
   yet another timeout, other technical issue or run a self-hosted
   infrastructure for which nobody really has the resources to maintain.

Apart from this, there is also the dependency on some pre-compiled
libraries in the osgeo4a repository. Keeping these up to date is not
something we will want in the long term (I was hoping that travis would
ship a more recent distro than trusty but haven't seen many hints in
this direction yet).

Bottomline: I don't think there's an easy fix but I think it's time to
start thinking about the future.

Matthias

On 01/02/2017 03:03 PM, René-Luc Dhont wrote:
> Hi Devs,
> 
> I would like to merge a PR https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3897 but
> Travis cannot ccomplete the tests.
> 
> Would it be simple to fix travis ?
> 
> Regards,
> René-Luc
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