[GHC DevOps Group] CI status

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Hi all!

It has now been two weeks since we decided to use CircleCI & AppVeyor as CI solutions for GHC going forward. Hence, I’d like to give you an update on the status of this effort.

On the basis of Mathieu’s original CI integration for Tweag I/O’s CircleCI build on our linear types fork of GHC, Mateusz Kowalczyk (a Tweag engineer) completed the Linux and macOS build, fast validation, and storage of the binary distribution (for now, as a temporary solution, in CircleCI’s artefact store). As you may have seen in my previous email, this work is now ready to be merged.

Ben and Mateusz also discussed a variation of these scheme that uses source and binary distributions instead of in-tree validation to perform the regression checking. This would have the advantage of also testing the substantial build system infrastructure that creates distribution tarballs. However, due to a number of problems (tickets #14392, #14411 & #14412) this is currently not possible. We still want to eventually move to this more comprehensive scheme, but for now we are moving this of the critical path to get the initial system running.

Mateusz and I contacted AppVeyor concerning a more generous than the standard limit for OSS projects (for the Windows build), but haven’t heard back yet.

In addition to merging the work so far (#14416), the next steps are

* support for PR builds and integration with Phabricator and
* Windows support.

BTW, you can always track the status at

  https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ContinuousIntegration

Cheers,
Manuel