[Qgis-psc] Handling the Travis CI situation

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 11/6/20 8:07 AM, Nyall Dawson wrote:

> Before we can make the switch and move away from Travis, we'll need to
> update these tests and get as many of them passing as possible on
> Github, and then handle the tricky job of backporting the test fixes
> and Github action setup to the 3.16/3.10 branches.
> 
> This is quite frankly a horrible job to do. It's going to be time
> consuming, tedious, and require a LOT of very in depth understanding
> of the QGIS code in order to make the correct decisions about whether
> a particular difference in test results is revealing a real issue or
> just a test which needs updating.
> 
> I don't think any one individual will be able to do this, and am
> raising the question with PSC of whether qgis.org is able to fund a
> coordinated sprint effort for a crack team of devs to resolve this.
> (I'd suggest Denis, Alessandro and Matthias would be the ideal
> candidates, and I could probably squeeze in up to ~10 hours on this
> too).
> 
> My estimate is that we're looking at a total commitment of roughly
> 10-12 developer days effort here. (Including the 3.10/3.16 backports)

Playing devil's advocate here: 10-12 days is a reasonable amount of work money.

Given Github is Microsoft/business owned, and we will stay/are heavy users of the 'free' stuff. 
We can only hope that it stays free for a longer time? 

Is there maybe a possibility to run Travis locally on (maybe some sponsorred) hardware?
Or other CI-machineries maybe running on university-machines, of which the owners want to sponsor (we had several offerings for hardware in history).

I'm very much aware that running your own CI server/software is hard (and not desireable I would say)! So my hope would be some company running Travis or other CI stuff already and just sponsoring some cycles to us...
OR even sponsoring Travis for us?

Given 10-12 days is (depending on hour rate) between 8K and 16K, and hearing (link??) that osgeo has a 4000 euro(?) license?
It would also maybe be easier to let somebody sponsor us for some years? Maybe some big corporate user (looking into plugins and providers: Google's, SAP, ESA, ???)

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde