Stick with Travis for continuous integration, or switch?

[Guy Harris via tcpdump-workers <tcpdump-workers () lists tcpdump org>]

> --- Begin Message ---
>
>
> From: Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net>
>
> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 22:29:21 -0800
>
> Travis CI is announcing on the travis-ci.org site that "... travis-ci.org will be shutting down in several weeks, with 
> all accounts migrating to travis-ci.com. Please stay tuned here for more information."
>
> They don't provide any information there.  However, at
>
>         https://travis-ci.community/t/build-delays-for-open-source-project/10272/26
>
> they say
>
>         As was pointed out in Builds hang in queued state 3 linked to earlier in this topic, Travis is moving workers 
> from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com 1 in preparation to fully close .org (or rather, make it read-only) around the New 
> Year.
>
>                 ...
>
>         So you need to migrate to .com to stop experiencing delays. Note the caveats:
>
>                 ...
>
> They claim that they'll still offer free service for free software:
>
>         Q. Will Travis CI be getting rid of free users? #
>
>         A. Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-source repositories on travis-ci.com and 
> will not be affected by the migration.
>
> They also say here:
>
>         https://blog.travis-ci.com/2020-11-02-travis-ci-new-billing
>
> that
>
>         The upcoming pricing change will not affect those of you who are:
>
>                 * Building on the Travis CI 1, 2 and 5 concurrency job plans who are building on Linux, Windows and 
> experimental FreeBSD environments.
>                 * GitHub Marketplace plans
>                 * Grouped Accounts
>                 * Enterprise customers (not building in our cloud environments)
>                 * Builders on our premium or manual plans. Contact the Travis CI support team for more information.
>
> but they also say that
>
>         The upcoming pricing change will affect those of you who are:
>
>         Building on the macOS environment
>
>         macOS builds need special care and attention. We want to make sure that builders on Mac have the highest 
> quality experience at the fastest possible speeds. Therefore, we are separating out macOS usage from other build usage 
> and offering a distinct add-on plan that will correlate directly to your macOS usage. Purchase only the credits you 
> need and use them until you run out.
>
>                 * $15 will buy you 25 000 credits (1 minute of mac build time costs 50 credits)
>                 * Use your credits for macOS builds only when you need to run these
>                 * Replenish your credits as you need them
>                 * More special build environments that fall into this category will be available soon
>
> which may mean that their "free tier" doesn't include macOS.
>
> They also say:
>
>         Building on a public repositories only
>
>         We love our OSS teams who choose to build and test using TravisCI and we fully want to support that community. 
> However, in recent months we have encountered significant abuse of the intention of this offering (increased activity 
> of cryptocurrency miners, TOR nodes operators etc.). 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 or discuss a renewable amount)
>                 * Usage will be tracked under your account information so that you can better understand how many 
> credits/minutes are being used
>
> We haven't been building on travis-ci.com, so presumably the first item in the list doesn't apply.  If the "We will be 
> offering an allotment..." part applies, the "should your run out of credits again you can repeat the process to request 
> more or discuss a renewable amount" seems like a pain.
>
> See also this comment:
>
>         
> https://travis-ci.community/t/org-com-migration-unexpectedly-comes-with-a-plan-change-for-oss-what-exactly-is-the-new-deal/10567/15
>
> where the commenter says:
>
>         When I emailed support for credits, they gave this list of requirements for the so-called “Open Source 
> Subscription”:
>
>         Thanks for contacting Travis-CI Support! I’d love to help!
>
>         We offer an Open Source Subscription for free to all non-commercial open-source projects. To qualify for an 
> Open Source subscription, the project must meet the following requirements:
>
>                 * You are a project lead or regular committer (latest commit in the last month)
>                 * Project must be at least 3 months old and is in active development (with regular commits and activity)
>                 * Project meets the OSD 13 specification
>                 * Project must not be sponsored by a commercial company or organization (monetary or with employees 
> paid to work on the project)
>                 * Project can not provide commercial services or distribute paid versions of the software
>         Sounds like you and your project? We’d be very happy to support you. If your project does not match these 
> requirements or you have questions, feel free to ask!
>
>         Looking forward to your response if you meet these requirements to proceed with the next steps.
>
> I guess we meet those requirements, although I'm not too keen on having to keep going hat-in-hand to them every time we 
> run out of credits; hopefully, we can just get a renewable amount.
>
> Frankly, I agree with the reply to that comment where they say
>
>         I wonder if travis thinks they have something to gain in reputation by letting this info out in dribs and 
> drabs, making it very hard to figure out what is actually going on.
>
> So we can either migrate to travis-ci.com or use other providers.
>
> We're currently using AppVeyor for Windows builds and Cirrus CI for FreeBSD builds.
>
> AppVeyor offers Windows, Linux, and macOS; Cirrus offers those plus FreeBSD.  Neither of those have, as far as I know, 
> decided to complicate the process of using them for free software projects.
>
> The only thing I see that Travis offers that others don't is non-x86 builds - they support:
>
>         ppc64le - useful for tcpdump given that at least one bug popped up only there (we were "cheating" in the use of 
> a crypto library, and only the ppc64le build of that library relied on the program not cheating);
>
>         arm64 for Linux - that may become a more common platform over time (I don't know whether it requires strict 
> alignment for 2-byte and 4-byte loads - as I remember from reading the ARMv8-A documentation, there's a control 
> register bit to indicate whether to fault or allow unaligned accesses, and I haven't checked whether Linux enables them 
> or not);
>
>         s390x (a/k/a z/Architecture, i.e. S/3x0-64) - a big-endian platform, so we can do some testing of operation on 
> big-endian machines.
>
> I don't know whether any other CI products that offer free service to free-software projects support non-x86 platforms.
>
> --- End Message ---
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