[Rd] Experimental CI tool for R

[Simon Urbanek]

Jeroen,

This is great! It is definitely a good basis to build on.

However, I wonder why your macOS setup is so extremely stripped down (not even Cairo, tcltk nor X11 - and not TeX, either) and as far from what we actually use as possible (using gcc instead of clang, openblas etc.). 

How do you plan to go about managing the build flavors? I think it would be great if there was a process whereby the builds could be updated so they are more realistic and thus more helpful, but since the repo is completely anonymous, it's unclear how one would go about that nor how it would be governed (and where to put documentation). For obvious reasons the Windows one is the only complete one, but given the requests for Homebrew-based package testing (independent of CRAN) it would be useful to publish the artefacts as well so that they could be used by GH action workflows for packages. Cleary we could just fork it, but I guess it would make more sense if this was a coordinated effort.

Cheers,
Simon


> On Jul 21, 2020, at 23:55, Jeroen Ooms <jeroen using berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> Based on ideas from the R-core discussion panel at useR2020, I created
> a little CI tool to make it easier to follow changes in R-devel, and
> to write/test patches for R.
> 
> The tool is based on a Github mirror of the SVN, where each new commit
> triggers a full make-check on 8 different system configurations. The
> results are published on: https://r-devel.github.io which gives an
> overview of the most recent revisions, including links to the build
> logs, and a link to the (unsigned) Windows installer. As of yesterday,
> it should be possible to inspect the build logs without signing in to
> GitHub.
> 
> The system can also be used to develop and test patches for base-R.
> Anyone can send pull-requests, which will trigger the same set of
> builds. The check results and link to Windows installer will appear
> under your pull request. Finally, GitHub makes it very easy to export
> a pull request as a patch file, which is the format that R-core
> members still like to use. More instructions are available on:
> https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn#readme
> 
> I hope this tool can make cross-platform testing and contributing of
> base-R slightly less painful, while we are still on SVN.
> 
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