[Plplot-general] Nightly testing?

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Hi Tom:

On 2016-09-22 13:54+0100 Tom Schoonjans wrote:

>
[Hazen said]
>> I am not familiar with Travis-CI or AppVeyor but they sound interesting.
>
> Nowadays Continuous Integration is a standard tool for automated testing and building nightly releases. With Travis-CI and AppVeyor you can easily configure that each commit sets of a number of builds on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows using any combination of options and compilers you want. Plus it’s completely free for open-source projects!
>
> It is also possible to require PRs to successfully build and survive testing on Travis-CI and AppVeyor as a precondition for being merged in.
>
> For an example of Travis-CI and AppVeyor, have a look at for example https://github.com/tschoonj/easyRNG <https://github.com/tschoonj/easyRNG>, scroll to the end of the page and click on the green badges.

Even if we move to github I would advise whoever is in charge of such
a move to not rely on semi-proprietary or proprietary products this
way since "free of cost" can change to "costly" with one corporate
decision at github.

I do agree that nightly testing of PLplot would be worthwhile.  In
fact, we are already almost completely set up to do that with ctest,
and very little more is required for anybody interested to publish
their nightly PLplot ctest results in cdash client mode. So all that
is essentially required is a cdash (see <www.cdash.org>) server to
collect and display those results in convenient form on a website.
KitWare already provides such a free service (see
<http://my.cdash.org/>), but I recall there are some limitations
(e.g., only a limited number of clients are allowed for a given
project such as PLplot). But note that cdash is a completely
open-source product so it should be straightforward to download that
source and build a cdash server. So ultimately if the my.cdash.org
limitations became an issue we would need to find a volunteer
(presumably someone who is already running their own website) who is
willing to build and host a cdash server for PLplot.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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