Re: continuous integrations

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Simon,

> Right.  I also had trouble with Savannah git mirrors in the past, but
> for the past year or so it has worked well.

Interesting...

> One of the few disadvantages with this approach that I've discovered is
> that you don't get tight coupling of ci/cd script and the rest of the
> repository.  This means that if you for some reason want to redo the
> pipeline on commit X in say 5 years, you may have to find whatever old
> commit of the CI pipeline job definition was used at the time and then
> set that up to be able to run the pipeline.  If the pipeline definition
> can be written to work with both current master git and 5 years old git,
> then it will work fine, but it means more work to keep it tested.  I've
> found this pattern useful once in a while, but it is not a strong
> reason.

I haven't had the need for this situation. And if I were in this situation,
it would be easy to look over the changes in the CI script, since it hardly
changes more often than 1x per year.

> >> Then we can apply that group for free CI/CD minutes
> >
> > What do you mean by that? I've found GitLab's limit of 400 minutes per
> > month and top-level group limiting, and see that GitHub does not have such
> > a limit.
> 
> I have applied for this program for a couple of programs and while it is
> a manual process and takes some time, it will give you 50.000 compute
> minutes per month:
> 
> https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/

This changes things, indeed. 50000 minutes would be comfortable for a set
of 20 to 50 GNU packages. But you need one person who will do the necessary
renewal paperwork once a year.

> By using a single project it would also be possible to purchase compute
> minutes in bulk and have them apply to all sub-projects.  I've found
> this to be fairly cheap compared to alternative cost of setting up and
> maintaining runners on my own hardware.

Sure: The electricity prices in the US are significantly lower than they
are in Sweden. [1] On this basis, your location can't compete.

> I've found it to only be cost
> effective to setup my own runners for platforms that gitlab doesn't
> support natively, such as arm64 or ppc64el.

Yes, it would be quite a waste of energy to run a QEMU-emulated CI job.

Bruno

[1] 
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country