CI system for PR builds

[Rainer Müller]

On 2018-04-03 12:31, db wrote:
> On 3 Apr 2018, at 02:20, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
>> Then please explain what this would offer us at all?
> 
> I'll try. GitLab let's you have external runners (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/README.html), while TravisCI offers a certain amount of pipeline minutes and only supports the currently supported macOS versions (AFAIK from what others posted not long ago on the subject). Now, since version 10.6 you can use an external repo hosted on GitHub (https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/22/gitlab-10-6-released/#gitlab-cicd-for-external-repos). And once a build succeeds, I guess it's also deliverable, whereas I'm not sure it's now the case.

As far as I understood it, gitlab-runner can be installed on a machine
and is then able to spawn VMs on-demand with snapshots with an executor
(docker, virtualbox, parallels, ...). The VM image also has to have
gitlab-runner installed.

But what exactly do you think would be the benefit from such a
complicated setup (GitHub -> GitLab -> External Runner)?

We can already trigger our Buildbot directly from GitHub and could spawn
a VM from a snapshot using libvirt. In any case, the the same amount of
work is required to prepare the VM image, just with different software
in it.

Rainer