Re: Boost CI Infrastructure

From: Boris Kolpackov (boris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-05-05 05:02:02

Ruben Perez <rubenperez038_at_[hidden]> writes:

> > 2. Standard "CI script"[2] that is used by all the C/C++ projects
> >    instead of each projects doing their own thing.
> 
> Out of curiosity, would this allow me to run my integration tests, which
> require to set up a DB instance and load data before running tests?

There is built-in support for installing system packages (currently
for Debian and Fedora or alike), so you would be able to install the
database (see [1] for an example of a package that does something
like this).

For loading data you would need a hook into this CI script. While this
is not yet supported, we do have support for enabling/disabling various
steps in this script. For example, this mechanism can be used to enable
optional binary distribution package generation (Debian/Fedora/archive)
and their upload. It would be pretty natural to extend this mechanism
to allow pre/post hooks for each step.

While the hook will most likely just execute whatever program you have
specified (so can be shell/Python/PowerShell/etc), the hard part here (at
least for the user) will be to come up with something portable that can
also be executed on Windows. But we have some ideas here: seeing that we
have a portable scripting language for ad hoc recipes/rules, we could make
it an option for writing hooks, so you will, at a minimum, be able to write
a thunk that decides what to execute on each platform.

We will most likely implement all of this for the next version (0.17.0)
since we need this functionality ourselves (also for DB-related testing).

[1] https://github.com/build2-packaging/SimpleBLE/blob/master/libsimpleble/manifest#L20-L35