Re: continuous integration

[Bruno Haible]

Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> CI tests should be catching these mistakes. (And problems like
> _NoReturn on OS X).

Yes, CI can catch some mistakes. Like, just last week, this one: [1].

Tim and I maintain a continuous integration for gnulib at [2].

More effort could be put in, in two directions:

* Like Paul says, instead of only building testdirs, it could build
  some packages that use gnulib. I would estimate that this would catch
  3x as many bugs as the current CI with just testdirs.

* Like you suggest, it would also be useful to test macOS, FreeBSD,
  Cygwin, and mingw builds.

> Is there any reasons services like Travis or Cirrus are not being used
> to proactively detect problems on Linux, OS X and FreeBSD?

For my part:

* I have only limited time to work on this; that's why I limit
  myself to CI integrations for a couple of packages on gitlab.

* I had not heard of Cirrus CI. Coverage of FreeBSD, additionally to
  Windows and macOS, sounds interesting. [3]

* Travis and Cirrus CI are most easily used on Github [4][5]. I don't
  much like to work on Github, because it tends to become a closed
  environment. E.g.
    - You can fork someone else's repository only if you stay on Github.
    - Many developers' email addresses are not published, which prevents
      you from reporting issues by email. You have to use Github "issues"
      instead.

But if someone wants to set it up and maintain it, I'm all for it!

Bruno

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2020-03/msg00041.html
[2] https://gitlab.com/gnulib/gnulib-ci
[3] https://cirrus-ci.org/features/#comparison-with-popular-ciaas
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_CI
[5] https://cirrus-ci.org/faq/#only-github-support