[okfn-labs] Travis CI

[Sean Hammond]

> Today I discovered the Travis CI (http://about.travis-ci.org) service and I
> was wondering if OKFN has some projects using it or if you have your own CI
> system. I think it would be awesome if OKFN provided something similar for
> the lab projects :-)

I'd be interested too. For CKAN we have a Jenkins instance that we use
both to run the unit tests and to build the docs each time a commit is
pushed to github, but to be honest it's a real pain to maintain and we
don't really have enough spare developer cycles to keep it running, as a
result it's broken all of the time and I don't think any CKAN devs look
at it.

There's just a lot of things that can go wrong, and if CKAN tests are
failing on Jenkins, chances are 99% that it's a problem on Jenkins
rather than a bug in CKAN, the tests are never 100% passing on Jenkins
(i.e. it's pretty much useless). Also Jenkins' default presentation of
the test runs it has done doesn't tell you what commit or branch it was
testing! Even if you managed to plug all the holes in Jenkins, give a
few days and new ones will appear.

Perhaps there are some Jenkins best practices out there that we aren't
following, and also simplifying and standardising CKAN deployment would
help.

I understand that buildbot which was previously used for CKAN had the
same fate.

With Travis CI, I worry that it will have the same problem as using
readthedocs for CKAN did, it broke on their end and they didn't fix it
or respond to emails, so we just had to migrate off it.