Re: [gentoo-dev] Please subscribe to travis-ci mail alias to get notifications on depgraph breakages

[Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto]

On Sun, 12 Apr 2015, Andrew Savchenko wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Apr 2015 00:23:29 +0200 Michał Górny wrote:
>> Hello, developers.
>>
>> We have added a new mail alias travis-ci@g.o and set up travis-ci [1]
>> to send notifications on status change there. Please seriously consider
>> adding yourself to the alias, and contributing to the quality
>> of Gentoo.

<snip>

> While I must admit that travis is a quite convenient tool (thought
> it has its limitations), I'd like to raise related software freedom
> concern.
>
> Travis itself is a closed, proprietary and non-trivial-to-replace
> solution. If travis will become essential for Gentoo development,
> it may undermine development freedom and Gentoo social contract,
> which states: "Gentoo will never depend upon a piece of software or
> metadata unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License, the
> GNU Lesser General Public License, the Creative Commons -
> Attribution/Share Alike or some other license approved by the Open
> Source Initiative (OSI)."

I've seen no one suggest the use of travis is or will be mandatory.
What Michał has done is setup the environment to help identify tree 
breakage. I want to thank him for working on a tool to improve the quality 
of Gentoo.

> If travis will change their terms of service in future and our
> workflow/infra will depends on these checks, whole development
> process may be hampered.

Our infra has no dependency over travis. The only thing we've done infra 
side about this is to create the alias travis-ci and an ml[1] 
(gentoo-automated-testing) where we plan to send the output of several 
automated tools so that interested parties can check the status and "fix" 
any issues.

  [1] - https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-automated-testing/

> So developers should think twice before depending their workflow on
> this solution. I'm refusing to sign up to the list which in my
> opinion indirectly violates Gentoo social contract.

I fail to see how by adding yourself to the alias, joining the ml or 
checking the archives, you are breaking in any way the Social Contract - 
but every developer is free to choose whether to use this tool or not.

> If some other free tool (preferably deployed on Gentoo
> infrastructure) will be used for this task, I'll sign-up right away.

If you care about this topic, you should talk to the QA team and 
developers that have showed an interest in automated testing.
Just the other day Magnus sent an email to this ml about a project his 
working on.

> Best regards,
> Andrew Savchenko

Regards,
Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto