Travis will no longer automatically provide free CI hours

[ketch]

https://blog.travis-ci.com/2020-11-02-travis-ci-new-billing:

We love our OSS teams who choose to build using TravisCI and we fully want to support that community. However, recently we have encountered significant abuse of the intention of this offering. Abusers have been tying up our build queues and causing performance reductions for everyone. In order to bring the rules back to fair playing grounds, we are implementing some changes for our public build repositories.

• For those of you who have been building on public repositories (on travis-ci.com, with no paid subscription), we will upgrade you to our trial (free) plan with a 10K credit allotment (which allows around 1000 minutes in a Linux environment).
• You will not need to change your build definitions when you are pointed to the new plan
• When your credit allotment runs out - we’d love for you to consider which of our plans will meet your needs.
• We will be offering an allotment of OSS minutes that will be reviewed and allocated on a case by case basis. Should you want to apply for these credits please open a request with Travis CI support stating that you’d like to be considered for the OSS allotment. Please include:
  • Your account name and VCS provider (like travis-ci.com/github/[your account name] )
  • How many credits (build minutes) you’d like to request (should your run out of credits again you can repeat the process to request more)
• Usage will be tracked under your account information so that you can better understand how many credits/minutes are being used

So we could keep requesting free time, or switch to something else. One possibility is with Github itself:

https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/guides/about-continuous-integration

I haven't looked into this yet but @ranocha says he's going to use it so perhaps he can tell us how hard it is to switch.

[ranocha]

I have migrated all of my Julia packages (pinned repos in my profile) and others I'm involved in. For Julia, there are some existing setups which make switching comparably easy. For example, look at trixi-framework/Trixi.jl#288. I don't know how hard it will be for Fortran/Python projects though. On the other hand, you can always restrict yourself to Linux (ubunturuns-on: ubuntu-latest) and use shell commands (run: cp .sample.env .env). Additionally, there are probably existing GitHub actions you can use for Clawpack.

[mandli]

I also received said email (the blog post is now removed BTW). I cannot imagine their plan to review every OSS request is going to be tractable so maybe they are going to change their tune but in the mean time maybe it's worth trying to see if we can switch?

[jedbrown]

Does Clawpack have any sort of continuous integration currently?

[mandli]

We are still working on it. Any suggestions on a good platform?

[jedbrown]

GitHub Actions is the lowest friction option, and honestly better experience than Travis ever was. We also use GitLab-CI with a self-hosted runner (for GPU tests).

[ranocha]

Most (if not all) of the Julia ecosystem switched to GitHub actions. So far, it is a nice experience for me. GPU tests need some customization, of course.