Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice regarding how to set up a basic CI regression / testing suite. This isn't my full time job, but a side project my group at work wants to spin up to... shall we say, give us a more real time monitoring of functionality and performance regressions coming out of the underlying software stack development (long story).

As none of us are particularly automation experts, I was looking for some advice from my fellow Tilderinos. Please forgive me if any of the below is obvious and/or silly.

A few basic requirements I had in mind:

1. Can handle different execution environments: essentially different versions of the software stack, both in docker form and (eventually) via lmod or some other module file approach (e.g., TCL), and sensible handling of a node list.

2. Related to one, supports using the products of builds as execution environments. Ideally we'd like to have a build step compile the stack and install it to a NFS from which we can load it as a module.

3. Simple to add tests. Again, this isn't our full time job -- we mostly want to add a quick bash script / makefile / source code or the like to the tests when we run into an issue and forgot about it.

4. Related. We should be able to store the entire thing as a git repo. I have seen this to some extent with Travis, but my experience with Jenkins was... sub-par (is there a history? Changelog? Any way at all of backing up the test config?).

5. Some sort of post-processing capabilities. At a glance we need to be able to see the top line performance numbers for 20-30 apps over the different build environment. Bonus points if there's a graph showing performance vs build version or the like, but honestly a CSV log file is good enough.

6. Whatever CI software we get has to be able to run this locally. Lots of these are internal only numbers / codes. FOSS prefered.

7. A webui for scheduling runs / visualizing results would be nice, but again this could be a bash script and none of us would bat an eye.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

It'd my understanding that C has stuck around in the UNIX world for so long, nearly half a century, mostly due to the inertia of legacy code.

If you could snap your fingers and magically port/fork the entire stack of open source codebases to the language of your choice, which would you pick and why?

https://gitlab.com/smoores/pliant

I’ve been a software developer for about three years, and I’ve always been enticed by and passionate about the open source scene. I have an assortment of projects variously available on GitHub and GitLab, but this is the first time I’ve ever created an open source project intended to be used by others.

Pliant is a barebones starter kit for anyone wanting to self host their own blog. It came out of my own efforts to start a blog, and it’s what currently powers https://tfhe.shanemoore.me.

I’d love to hear you’re feedback, or just discuss open source, blogging, web technologies, or whatever else comes up.

Can be something current or ancient, and if you've really got an axe to grind feel free to drag in Windows or macOS or other proprietary operating systems.

Personally after using i3 for around half a decade now (though I switched to sway about a year ago) everything else I try just seems to add friction.

tldr; chunkwm has been completely rewritten and is now yabai

From the chunkwm site:

chunkwm is no longer in development because of a C99 re-write, yabai.

yabai was originally supposed to be the first RC version of chunkwm. However due to major architectural changes, supported systems, and changes to functionality, it is being released separately. There are multiple reasons behind these changes, based on the experience I've gained through experimenting with, designing, and using both kwm and chunkwm. Some of these changes are performance related while other changes have been made to keep the user experience simple and more complete, attempts to achieve a seamless integration with the operating system (when possible), proper error reporting, and yet still keep the property of being customizable.

For those who don't know, chunkwm was / is a tiling windows manager that is sort of like bspwm / i3 etc. I've been using chunkwm for a few months now and love it. If you're also an i3 user, the lack of a proper super key does make your key combos different, but overall its an excellent window manager. Both chunkwm and yabai use koekeishiya's Simple Hotkey Daemon (skhd).

Anyway, I gave the new version the day and its pretty good, but still has some quirks. It seems like development is moving along quickly, so keep an eye on it.