[Bioperl-l] Travis CI build improvements

[Zakariyya Mughal]

On 2017-04-18 at 15:24:25 +0100, Peter Cock wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 2:39 PM, Fields, Christopher J
> <cjfields at illinois.edu> wrote:
> >     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
> 
> There is also the new cron option in TravisCI, which might be useful
> here - e.g. set a weekly TravisCI job and use the environment
> variable $TRAVIS_EVENT_TYPE == 'cron' as a flag to trigger
> the full test mode rather than off-line only tests.
> 
> https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/cron-jobs/
> https://github.com/travis-ci/beta-features/issues/1
> 
> As a downside this could make coverage plots harder to interpret
> as some commits should get higher coverage than others...
> 
> Peter

I could give this a try. If the cron builds are only run on a single
branch, then only looking at that single branch should remain consistent
modulo any network outages.

Cheers,
- Zaki Mughal