Re: [Plplot-general] Nightly testing?

[Tom S. <tom...@me...>]

Hello once again,

Travis-CI and Appveyor are not part of Github, but are separate companies in their own right. They are just (popular) examples of companies that make use of the webhook and integration possibilities that are offered by Github. A list of similar companies can be found here: https://github.com/integrations <https://github.com/integrations>

To the best of my knowledge, most of these companies operate under a financial model that includes free usage by open source projects, but paid services for closed source projects (usually these are private repositories on Github, but private hosting is also possible). Either way, their usage is completely optional, though highly recommended. Even if one of these continuous integration providers would go broke or cease to provide free services for open source projects, there are alternative providers available, or they can just be turned off and other testing options could be found.

I have to admit that my knowledge of CMake, CTest and CDash is next to nothing (I am more of autotools kind of guy myself), but it looks promising. If you would get such a server up and running, I am sure there are ways to have a webhook following a commit trigger a build.

Best,

Tom

> On 22 Sep 2016, at 20:06, Alan W. Irwin <ir...@be...> wrote:
> 
> 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
> __________________________