GitHub automation for Cygwin builds [Was: Updated: moreutils v0.65-1]

[Adam Dinwoodie]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 22:31, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 1/16/2021 3:33 PM, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
> > On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 20:22, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
> >> Version 0.65-1 of moreutils has been uploaded and should be coming
> >> soon to a distribution server near you.
> >
> > In case anyone's interested or has thoughts:
> >
> > As part of working on this release, I've been playing with GitHub's
> > automation tools. The entire build / test / package / release / upload
> > process was performed using free ephemeral GitHub-managed VMs. At
> > least in theory, this reduces the manual work for future releases to:
> >
> > - Commit a version of the Cygport file with an updated version number.
> > - Create a tag and push that tag to GitHub
> > - Wait for the confirmation email to arrive
> > - Send the announcement email
> >
> > This is obviously serving a similar purpose to the automated builds
> > that Scallywag provides; I'm not sure I'd have bothered with this
> > project had I not already been most of the way through it before I
> > spotted Scallywag existed. I suspect in theory Scallywag's access to
> > the Cygwin servers means it's potentially more powerful, but Scallywag
> > also comes with some general caveats ("at this stage, this is only
> > probably useful for verifying that BUILD_REQUIRES is correct"),
>
> I assume you're quoting from https://cygwin.com/packaging/build.html.  Scallywag
> does have some limitations currently, but I think the statement you quoted is
> obsolete.  I often have Scallywag deploy my packages, as does Jon Turney.

Yes, that was my source here. I experimented with Scallywag briefly,
but was put off by (a) that warning and (b) the fact that my first
builds failed because I apparently use the wrong quoting style in my
Cygport files. And, as I say, that I was already a significant way to
a working GitHub Action process.

> The limitations I've bumped into are:
>
> 1. Scallywag will time out after an hour on each arch.

This is a killer for me. Getting this working with moreutils was a
simple proof-of-concept; the key package where this will likely save
me time and energy is Git, and the Git test suite takes multiple hours
to run on Cygwin. GitHub actions have a per-job limit of 6 hours, and
a per-workflow limit of 72 hours.

> 2. Several of my packages fail to build on x86 because of gcc crashes.
>
> I think these limitations are outweighed by the fact that a Scallywag build is
> automatically triggered by a push to an official source repo
> (https://cygwin.com/packaging/repos.html).  All maintainers can use this without
> any special setup.

That's clearly incredibly valuable, yes. I'm hoping to reduce the
special setup using GitHub Actions requires, but it's clearly going to
require more than zero setup.

Adam