[GHC DevOps Group] CI

[Ben Gamari]

Manuel M T Chakravarty <manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io> writes:

>> 13.10.2017, 00:18 schrieb Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com>:
>> 
>> I think this list is being a bit generous to the hosted option.
>> 
>> Other costs of this approach might include:
>> 
>> * Under this heterogeneous scheme we will have to maintain two or more
>>   distinct CI systems, each requiring some degree of setup and
>>   maintenance.
>
> As Mathieu mentioned in an earlier post, most of the code is the same.
> It is essentially just the CI-specific config files that vary. Given
> how quickly Mathieu wrote the one for CircleCI, I doubt that this is
> much of an overhead. Anyway, I added a point about having to deal with
> two CI providers.
>
Indeed we shall see. You may very well be right.

> I think, the issues with large, long running jobs is why Mathieu
> proposed CicleCI over Travis. But you are right, of course, if we
> outsource work, we need to trust the people who we outsource to to do
> a good job.
>
> On the other hand, I assume that CircleCI, has a response team that
> jumps in when bad things happen.

Indeed, in speaking to the Rust folks they said that they were generally
fairly impressed with CircleCI and have been considering moving.

> In contrast, I don’t think, we want to hand you a pager so we can
> notify you if some urgent maintenance is needed in the middle of the
> night.

I appreciate that; I wouldn't want that either :)

>> It's still quite unclear to me what a CircleCI/Appveyor solution will
>> ultimately cost, but will almost certainly not be free. Assuming there
>> are users who are willing to foot that bill, this is of course fine.
>> However, it's quite contrary to the assumptions we have been working
>> with for much of this process.
>
> Yes, you are right. That we have sponsors for the CI costs changes the
> situation wrt to the previous planning. And it is precisely one of the
> reasons why we founded the GHC DevOps group: to unlock new resources.
>
> I am sorry that this comes in the middle of the existing effort. I can
> see how this is annoying. However, all the work on getting GHC’s build
> in shape and the scripts to generate artefacts are all still needed.

Indeed the timing was slightly suboptimal but I'm nevertheless very glad
you brought this up. You have definitely helped me better understand the
trade-offs at play and I think at this point I can say that, despite the
costs, moving to CircleCI/Appveyor is the right decision.

This is especially true in light of today's news that Rackspace will be
ending their open source support program at the end of this year, which
makes sustaining any self-hosted solution significantly harder
resource-wise.

Let's figure out how to make this happen. This week is turning out to be
a bit busy for me, but perhaps this weekend or next week I'll see what
can be done to hook up Phabricator and try to get the build automation
in place for i386 and CentOS. However, if you have time do feel free to
start plugging away at this yourself in the meantime.

Cheers,

- Ben
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