Re: Continuous integration

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 7/14/17 11:08 PM, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> I think everyone is waiting. Besides me, no one else seems to have used
> the test GitLab instance.

All the latest builds there are broken now.

And no email notifications means no actual usage.

> I strongly encourage everyone to look around
> the Hydra instance we use today, GitLab, BuildBot, and other CI systems
> they may know.

I suspect what we actually need to do is to

  - (optionally) Build a table of check marks with how the CI options 
correspond to the criteria we've enumerated.
  - Nag the Emacs maintainers and the FSF personnel about giving us a 
hardware, or even setting up a GitLab instance themselves, for the Emacs 
developers to use.
  - (important) Somehow deal with the perpetually-broken build and _set 
up email notifications_. There is no other practical way to encourage 
everyone to use the CI. And that's more essential than a (reasonable) 
choice of the CI server.

I think the voting may be considered optional since Richard more or less 
okay'd a FSF GitLab installation. If somebody actively disagrees, nobody 
said we absolutely have to have just one CI server.

On the subject of checkmarks, though:

- GitLab is reasonably feature-rich, and it has a Web UI that's familiar 
to many younger developers. Which is a huge plus. Code Review capability 
included.
- BuildBot seemingly has no code review capability, and seems to be only 
a lego-like system for a ultimately flexible build pipelines. Not our 
primary pain point, I think.
- Hydra is fairly limited in terms of features (not code review, for one 
thing) and has a minimal UI. It's also broken at the moment 
(http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/emacs-trunk isn't functional, and 
there are JS errors if you open the Error Console; CORS seems to be the 
problem).

So GitLab seems to come ahead as an obvious winner to me. If you really 
want us to vote, probably better to put that call into a new thread, 
instead of deep in the innards of this one.