Continuous Integration and Cross Compilation

[Páli Gábor János]

2014-06-19 1:53 GMT+02:00 Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com>:
> We actually already do have both of these already, too: Joachim
> Breitner for example has set us up a Travis-CI[1] setup, while Gabor
> Pali has set us up nightly builds[2]. Travis-CI does the job of fast
> CI, but it's not good for a few reasons:
[..]
> 3) It has limited platform support - only recently did it have OS X,
> and Windows is not yet in sight. Ditto for FreeBSD. These are crucial
> for CI as well, as they encompass all our Tier-1 platforms. This could
> be fixed with cross compilation, but again, that's a big, big project.

Regarding FreeBSD, I am fine with having only the nightly builds for
them.  Fortunately, it is seldom the case when something is broken due
to some platform-specific setting.

> So I'll also make a suggestion: just to actually get something that
> will pull GHC's repo every 10 minutes or so, do a build, and then
> email ghc-devs *only* if failures pop up.

Yeah, this could be done by the nightly builders.  They have a
"Continuous" build mode (thanks to Ian) which probably means that they
will start over the same process as soon as the current one has
finished.  I wrote "probably" because I have not ever tried it but saw
it in the sources :-)  I think sending mails in case of failures only
could be also done somehow, but that may require some changes to the
sources.