[Qgis-developer] CI testing: the straight truth

[Nyall Dawson]

On 4 January 2017 at 07:59, Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:
> 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.

Argh... what a pain! Still, I think in some ways this is a good
reflection of the exponential growth in QGIS unit tests since your
initial work introducing the CI infrastructure. I certainly would
never want to go back to the pre-CI days!

Just wondering- is there any chance sending an email to the Travis
crew could get an extension to this build time? I can't see anything
on their publicised plans, but perhaps they have a cheaper unlimited
build time option available for open source projects?

I'd like to see us exhaust these "easier" options first before
requiring someone to donate time into tweaking/changing the CI
infrastructure.

Nyall


>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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Qgis-developer mailing list
>> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
>> List info: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> List info: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer