Question about DMD's Travis CI

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 10 September 2017 at 01:25:29 UTC, Michael V. Franklin 
wrote:
> I've been battling DMD's Travis CI for the past couple of weeks 
> with a few of my pull requests.  It often fails for various 
> reasons that have nothing to do with my PRs (e.g. "The job 
> exceeded the maximum time limit for jobs, and has been 
> terminated.")  It's also takes almost half a day to complete.
>
> What is the purpose of Travis CI?  What is it testing for that 
> the much more reliable AutoTester isn't already testing for?  
> Can anything be done to make it more reliable and efficient?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike

Travis CI is just a service that runs every-time that you submit 
a commit. The testing that's done is whatever the maintainers set 
up for it to run. There seem to be a few options, but Travis CI 
is the most popular. I suspect your issue is more with the tests 
that are running.

On balance, I think these autotesters are a positive. I might 
test code I submit on my machine, but these allow testing on a 
wide array of architectures and machines, which is a positive for 
everyone.

Of course, it's not always easy. Sometimes it's a little annoying 
to get the formatting just right. I certainly have had that issue 
recently, but I think I have more of a hang of what is required 
now.

More generally, I would acknowledge that they are not perfect and 
there is certainly room for improvement. For instance, I have a 
phobos PR with an X from codecov, which seems to be suggesting 
that I'm not testing all the functions. However, it seems to be 
counting member functions defined in the unittests as part of 
this and I only included those so that I could analyze them at 
compile-time.