[matplotlib-devel] Financial support for continuous integration

2013-01-30 Thread Michael Droettboom
In discussions with Perry Greenfield at STScI, it seems we are in the 
position of being able to get some financial support to pay for a 
continuous integration system.

Travis has shown itself to be rather glitchy for matplotlib.  The tight 
integration with Github PRs is really convenient.  However, matplotlib 
has longer test runs and more dependencies than many projects.  The 
frequent false positives start to wear down at a certain point.  And we 
still aren't testing everything because we can't aren't installing 
Inkscape and other things in the Travis VM.

So we're looking to add another paid, hosted continuous integration 
service that will better meet our needs.  A hosted service is nice 
because it's easy to give multiple developers access to the system so 
anyone can tweak it and keep it going -- the bottleneck of a single 
developer responsible for maintenance of the build machine was a problem 
years ago when we were using buildbot.  This may remain "in addition to" 
rather than "instead of" Travis for some time.

An obvious first choice to me is ShiningPanda, as I have experience 
using it for astropy.  Jenkins (the software Shining Panda is based on), 
is a really easy-to-use system, for those not familiar with it.  And we 
can store the output of the tests (i.e. the result_images) for later 
inspection.  I think this feature alone is huge for matplotlib.  They 
also offer Windows build slaves.  There is no OS-X (probably because 
Apple licensing doesn't really allow for use in a VM), but results can 
be "published" to their Jenkins instance.

Are there any other similar alternatives we should consider before we 
move forward?

Mike

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Re: [matplotlib-devel] Financial support for continuous integration

2013-01-30 Thread Damon McDougall
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Michael Droettboom  wrote:
> In discussions with Perry Greenfield at STScI, it seems we are in the
> position of being able to get some financial support to pay for a
> continuous integration system.
>
> Travis has shown itself to be rather glitchy for matplotlib.  The tight
> integration with Github PRs is really convenient.  However, matplotlib
> has longer test runs and more dependencies than many projects.  The
> frequent false positives start to wear down at a certain point.  And we
> still aren't testing everything because we can't aren't installing
> Inkscape and other things in the Travis VM.
>
> So we're looking to add another paid, hosted continuous integration
> service that will better meet our needs.  A hosted service is nice
> because it's easy to give multiple developers access to the system so
> anyone can tweak it and keep it going -- the bottleneck of a single
> developer responsible for maintenance of the build machine was a problem
> years ago when we were using buildbot.  This may remain "in addition to"
> rather than "instead of" Travis for some time.
>
> An obvious first choice to me is ShiningPanda, as I have experience
> using it for astropy.  Jenkins (the software Shining Panda is based on),
> is a really easy-to-use system, for those not familiar with it.  And we
> can store the output of the tests (i.e. the result_images) for later
> inspection.  I think this feature alone is huge for matplotlib.  They
> also offer Windows build slaves.  There is no OS-X (probably because
> Apple licensing doesn't really allow for use in a VM), but results can
> be "published" to their Jenkins instance.
>
> Are there any other similar alternatives we should consider before we
> move forward?
>
> Mike

I think hosted infrastructure is the right choice. I was initially
going to suggest that we try and work with a bespoke solution. That
way we could roll our own build architectures.

On reflection I think the maintenance headache of managing our own
build slaves outweighs the convenience of having it hosted, as you
point out.

-- 
Damon McDougall
http://www.damon-is-a-geek.com
Institute for Computational Engineering Sciences
201 E. 24th St.
Stop C0200
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1229

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