Question about DMD's Travis CI

[Seb 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?

Testing DMD bootstrapped with other and older compilers.

> What is it testing for that the much more reliable AutoTester 
> isn't already testing for?

The reason for using Travis is that
1) it's really hard to modify the configuration of the 
auto-tester (example: https://github.com/braddr/at-client/pull/3)
2) resources/machines at the auto-tester are limited and paid by 
Brad personally - Travis allows five jobs in parallel for free

> Can anything be done to make it more reliable and efficient?

I agree that these random failures are really annoying and 
actually there has been work to improve this. The latest effort 
are the dub registry mirrors which will be added by default to 
the upcoming dub 1.6, e.g.:

https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/1190

The maximum time limit issue could be solved by reducing the 
amount of permutations tested even further.