Would a Mac BuildBot service be a good idea?

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#1

It seems like half the timeouts I see are in the middle of the day when https://traviscistatus.com/ says that there’s a big backlog of OSX builds.

It’s a regular thing, probably something to do with Linux VMs on Google Cloud (where sudo: true builds run) and EC2 (where sudo: false builds run) being way cheaper than MacStadium machines.

nix developer @asomers has been running a dedicated FreeBSD machine with BuildBot, because they want to support that platform properly and nobody seems to provide CI-As-A-Service for FreeBSD. Their BuildBot tends to take a few minutes to run. Their OSX builds on Travis take a few hours.

Could this help solve a bunch of project’s CI woes? Personally, I’m willing to help pay for it, but I don’t have time to maintain a BuildBot instance alone. I’ve got enough on my plate lately.

#2

I think CircleCI is having a quite good reputation as they have OSS and enterprise builds on the same instance. However, their OSX builders need manual approval to use (for free) and there’s only one free builder available unlike Travis.

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#3

Travis CI also has OSS and Pro builds using the same instances (“Travis CI Enterprise” is self-hosted Travis, so obviously it uses separate instances). It’s just that Travis Pro builds take precedence.

But if CircleCI builds are more real-time, then yeah, maybe the bors-ng docs should start recommending it over Travis for this stuff.

#4