[Bioperl-l] Travis CI build improvements

[Fields, Christopher J]

    On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Zakariyya Mughal <zaki.mughal at gmail.com> wrote:
…
    > As for the tests that require the network or optional dependencies, it
    > is possible to enable different builds conditionally. I believe the best
    > approach for the ones that require networking would be to create a
    > special branch that enables those tests. This branch can just be rebased
    > off the current master branch whenever a new release is uploaded.
    >
    > Regards,
    > - Zakariyya Mughal
    
    That's an interesting idea about running the online tests only on
    specific branches. Biopython tries to run our online tests weekly
    via buildbot, and this is part of our (time consuming) release
    process (final run of full test suite on the release manager's own
    machines).
    
    Peter

We did this with the 1.6.x branch for a while, as it was diverging more and more from the master branch (this was also at a point where we started cleaving out none-core-like modules) but we wanted to keep testing it.   IIRC we can also set up travis to run with specific env. variables on or off for a particular environment, which can then be used to trigger additional optional tests (similar in respects to Dist::Zilla’s release-only or author tests).   The downside is this would be triggered every commit, which we don’t really want.  So, using a branch is a much simpler, elegant solution (test only upon merge).

chris