Improve use of Travis CI

[neovim]

Improve use of Travis CI

[cweagans]

From there, it's a matter of starting to write and run automated tests (and run those before the builds so that we can skip the builds if the tests fail - this will save CPU time for Travis)

[mrshu]

👍

[tarruda]

@cweagans , that seems promising

[ashleyh]

👍

[rjw57]

Is it possible to build for multiple platforms on Travis in a testing matrix? AIUI the only non-Ubuntu, non-Linux is OSX and that's only run if your language is set to Objective C.

[tarruda]

@rjw57 I don't think so, but what @cweagans suggested is possible with a github hook. We would continue to use travis normally but also add a hook that would tell a set of hosted virtual machines(one for each platform) to download, build and report the status.

One example of this is testling-ci which automatically tests node.js packages on many browsers/versions. We could go far and even display badges of the build status on the many platforms.

AWS would be a good choice for this since it provides VMs for windows and unixes(not sure about mac though).

[aktau]

AWS would be a good choice for this since it provides VMs for windows and unixes(not sure about mac though).

@tarruda I seem to remember that the homebrew devs had found a way, I think they have a CI farm. But adding windows to the test matrix would already improve things dramatically, since it's the most-used platform that's most likely to go (very) wrong.

[tarruda]

Closing for now, as there's much to be done. We can revisit this later