[PATCH 7/7] .travis.yml: Test against several Emacs versions

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On 2017-09-02 00:41, David Bremner wrote:
> I take it travis doesn't object to building 4 versions of emacs from
> scratch?

I don't know why they would. There are many open-source projects with 
much higher computational demands using Travis' free service. There are 
also many projects doing the exact thing proposed in this patch:

https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=travis+EMACS_VERSION+language%3AYAML&type=Code

> How long does that take?

About 2-4 minutes for the tagged releases and 6 minutes for the 
snapshot. You can see the times yourself in the build logs for the 
Travis results of my fork:

https://travis-ci.org/CyberShadow/notmuch

The figure you're looking for is the execution time of the "make -f 
emacs-travis.mk install_emacs" command, displayed on the right-hand side 
in the log.

> I'm not very happy about downloading and running code from a third party
> during our test runs.

Why do you think so?

Consider:

- You are already relying on a third-party here (Travis). They run a lot 
of code specific to their testing platform on their systems.

- The code (emacs-travis.mk) is specific to Travis. It is not part of 
the notmuch test suite, just the Travis configuration which runs it.

- Using emacs-travis.mk in this manner is how many Emacs packages run 
their tests:

https://github.com/search?p=1&q=emacs-travis.mk+language%3AYAML&type=Code&utf8=%E2%9C%93

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir