Re: Continuous Integration for package.el Packages

[Moritz Ulrich <moritz@tarn-vedra.de>]

Sebastian Wiesner writes:

> 2013/7/7 Moritz Ulrich <moritz@tarn-vedra.de>:
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>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> During my efforts to integrate package.el packages into the Nix[1]
>> package manager, I started running automatic builds on all packages
>> available in GNU ELPA and Marmalade packages.
>
> Do you intend to test MELPA, too?   It builds snapshot versions, which
> are more interesting to test.

I'll see if I find time to setup MELPA too. You're right - it's more
interesting.

>> The results are available on my Hydra instance[2]. Most build errors are
>> caused by missing 'Version' headers. Some others fail because they
>> depend on packages neither available in ELPA nor in Marmalade (visible
>> in the 'Evaluation Errors' tab).
>>
>> The code implementing all this is available on Github[3]. A cronjob
>> fetches new releases every four hours, Hydra starts building soon after.
>>
>> What do you think of this? Is it useful? Does your build fails, even if
>> it works on your local Emacs instance? Please tell me!
>
> To be honest, it is not useful for me.
>
> I already have a more powerful setup for automatically build and test
> my Flycheck package.  It's based on Carton and Vagrant to create
> automated and repeatable VMs for local unit testing and Travis CI to
> build my package and run my ERT tests after every single push.
>
> As long as you do not run my ERT tests with all necessary dependencies
> (beyond just package.el deps), you don't tell me anything I didn't
> already know.

The code currently loads all .el files with 'test' in their name and
runs ert afterwards. This won't work with non-package.el dependencies
though. Nix blocks access on environment which isn't explicitly listed
in the buildInputs.

To add native dependencies, package.el would need a new dependency field
listing native dependencies. This won't be easy, but would make
installations way more reproducible.

-- 
Moritz Ulrich