[DISCUSS] Organizing CI

[Dmitry Blotsky <db...@microsoft.com>]

Hi all,

With commits triggering builds, we're starting to hit scaling problems on our CI: https://paste.apache.org/ktJr. We have some awesome new things for which we can use the CI:

-          Static analysis (FB Infer)

-          Automated releases

-          Documentation generation

-          Testing on more emulators, platforms, and devices

-          Moving our platform and tools builds, so all our builds are on Apache infrastructure

To keep up with our own pace, we should spend some time optimizing our CI process. So, here is some food for thought:

-          Builds can be greatly sped up if we can alleviate the path-length limit issue that prevents us from packaging up a Cordova build

o   Does anyone know of a tool that can zip up too-long paths?

o   Does anyone know if we can reduce our path lengths?

o   Does anyone know where we can store a buffer of builds? Cordova-vm is an option (~30GB of space).

-          We can run more builds in parallel if folks connect more slaves to the CI (instructions here: https://github.com/apache/cordova-medic/blob/master/SLAVES.md)

-          We can split the build process into levels (e.g. smoke, regression, end-to-end) and run them on different occasions

Kindly,
Dmitry