travis ci tests

[ahmadia]

I'd like to have all sorts of continuous integration tests, but it would be great if we had a simple sanity test for hashstack2 and hashdist.

Since hashdist has unit tests, those should be run on every commit. If it can be completed in reasonable time, a hashstack2 build would also be useful.

[certik]

The Travis tests would simply create a few profiles that can be built in less than 50 minutes on Travis. We can have as many of these profiles as we want, so we can in principle test quite a few packages. I can imagine having:

• a test for basic Python + all deps (png, bzip2, readline, openssl, ...)
• Install deps using apt-get, just built python and test numpy/scipy/matplotlib stack
• reuse python from Travis, build other packages, like
  • petsc
  • netcdf
  • ...

A setup like that should be able to test pretty much everything, except some big packages like vtk.

[ahmadia]

:+1: I think the most important tests mimic an HPC environment, where a basic compiler toolchain exists with MPI, but we want to build our own PETSc, Python, and tools that build on or are incorporated by those two.

[certik]

That's right --- Travis is just Debian, so we can install MPI or anything else easily systemwide. But we should test both systemwide and our own builds for few of the most important packages. I think we should be able to make the tests quite robust.

[cekees]

We're getting an awful lot of travis failures that are unrelated to the PR's. I think mostly due to timeouts. Any ideas on how to fix that?

[certik]

Only by hosting the packages ourselves. I think hit needs better support for multiple online repositories to find the source packages (with the same hash).