[GHC DevOps Group] DevOps: Next steps

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

> Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com>:
> "Boespflug, Mathieu" <m at tweag.io <mailto:m at tweag.io>> writes:
>>> At this point I'm fairly close to agreeing with you that CircleCI is the
>>> right path forward. My primary reservation continues to be non-Linux
>>> platforms.
>> 
>> Cool. :) I suggest pushing forward with drafting the list of
>> requirements first. To make sure we identify anything important that
>> may or not have come up in the discussion so far. And then Manuel will
>> want to see a proposal put forth to the group. Given this current
>> landscape,
>> 
>> - there are 3 major desktop OS'es (Windows, macOS, Linux)
>> - there are 2 major mobile OS'es (iOS, Android),
>> 
>> I think we'll want something that works for the 3 major desktop
>> platforms now (aka the current "Tier 1"). And maybe later consider how
>> to best support the major mobile platforms, or indeed other desktop
>> platforms if the maintainership resources are there.
>> 
>> As Facundo mentions - in reality even the choice of how we run tests
>> for the mobile platforms is independent of the CI driver. Remote
>> drones are also *possible* using hosted CI services (at some
>> complexity cost that might not outweigh those of straight up
>> emulation). We've done that before with AWS drones.
> 
> Manuel no doubt has something to add here, but for what it's worth I
> have generally written off testing GHC on Android/iOS. Everything I have
> heard of automated testing on these platforms make it sound absolutely
> terrible.
> 
> Instead, I think it's significantly easier to just test a standard Linux
> distribution running on ARM and AArch64. When I have done work on ARM in
> the past this was how I tested (using any one of a number of inexpensive
> development boards).

I am not sure what’s hard about testing iOS…provided you are willing to go with a payed service. A popular one among iOS devs is Buildkite:

  https://buildkite.com/ <https://buildkite.com/>

Maybe Danny Greg’s choice quote from the Buildkite website should inspire us too ;)

>  I managed to set up our entire CI rig in one afternoon after battling for weeks with Xcode bots and Jenkins

(and Danny, ex-GitHub, knows what he is doing)

Manuel

PS: Not that I want to further complicate this discussion, but Buildkite provides another alternative in the design space. Run your own build servers, but let somebody else do the work of organising running the builds (and pay them money in exchange).

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devops-group/attachments/20171012/138b5b22/attachment-0001.html>