New subject: ATTN: Boost GSoC mentors and students: Continuous Integration for GSoC thoughts

3 Jun 2013

      Dear Boost,

I spent the weekend experimenting with getting CI set up for the async file
i/o library which will hopefully become Boost.AFIO through Paul's GSoC. I
tried a number of free-for-open-source CI providers which integrate tightly
with GitHub, and eventually settled with Travis CI. You can see the last
commit CI results at https://travis-ci.org/ned14/TripleGit.

As much as Travis CI has a primitive and clunky UI, unlike the other CIs
it's based on snapshotting VMs with root privs which gives you unparalleled
flexibility for testing config, so I was able to configure this to happen
with each and every git push to github:

1. Test that code builds with GCC 4.6 and clang 3.2.

2. Test that unit and functional tests execute without error when built with
GCC 4.6 and clang 3.2.

3. Run unit and functional tests with valgrind --tool=memcheck and test that
no memory errors nor memory leaks occur with binaries built with GCC 4.6 and
clang 3.2.

4. Install GCC 4.8 and compile everything using -fsanitize=thread (i.e.
instrument using the port of clang's ThreadSanitizer v2 to GCC), then
execute a full set of unit and functional tests looking for race conditions
and if any, fail. You'll note I've marked that test as allowed to fail,
because Boost v1.53 has a number of known race conditions when used as C++11
which are hopefully fixed in v1.54 :)

Personally speaking, I think this depth and degree of CI is *invaluable* to
modern software development practice.

So the question becomes: are the Boost GSoC mentors and students interested
in setting up CI for this year's GSoC projects, or at least the ones hosted
on github at https://github.com/BoostGSOC?

In case you're wondering how hard it is to set up Travis CI for your github
project, you just need one file called .travis.yml. You can see the one I
wrote at https://github.com/ned14/TripleGit/blob/master/.travis.yml.

Thoughts?

Niall

---
Opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of
BlackBerry Inc.

ATTN: Boost GSoC mentors and students: Continuous Integration for GSoC thoughts

Niall Douglas

Dominique Devienne

Daniel Pfeifer

Daniel Pfeifer

Alexander Lamaison

Daniel Pfeifer

Alexander Lamaison

Daniel Pfeifer

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