matplotlib-devel Mailing List for matplotlib

On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:
> In discussions with Perry Greenfield at STScI, it seems we are in the
> position of being able to get some financial support to pay for a
> continuous integration system.
>
> Travis has shown itself to be rather glitchy for matplotlib.  The tight
> integration with Github PRs is really convenient.  However, matplotlib
> has longer test runs and more dependencies than many projects.  The
> frequent false positives start to wear down at a certain point.  And we
> still aren't testing everything because we can't aren't installing
> Inkscape and other things in the Travis VM.
>
> So we're looking to add another paid, hosted continuous integration
> service that will better meet our needs.  A hosted service is nice
> because it's easy to give multiple developers access to the system so
> anyone can tweak it and keep it going -- the bottleneck of a single
> developer responsible for maintenance of the build machine was a problem
> years ago when we were using buildbot.  This may remain "in addition to"
> rather than "instead of" Travis for some time.
>
> An obvious first choice to me is ShiningPanda, as I have experience
> using it for astropy.  Jenkins (the software Shining Panda is based on),
> is a really easy-to-use system, for those not familiar with it.  And we
> can store the output of the tests (i.e. the result_images) for later
> inspection.  I think this feature alone is huge for matplotlib.  They
> also offer Windows build slaves.  There is no OS-X (probably because
> Apple licensing doesn't really allow for use in a VM), but results can
> be "published" to their Jenkins instance.
>
> Are there any other similar alternatives we should consider before we
> move forward?
>
> Mike

I think hosted infrastructure is the right choice. I was initially
going to suggest that we try and work with a bespoke solution. That
way we could roll our own build architectures.

On reflection I think the maintenance headache of managing our own
build slaves outweighs the convenience of having it hosted, as you
point out.

-- 
Damon McDougall
http://www.damon-is-a-geek.com
Institute for Computational Engineering Sciences
201 E. 24th St.
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