One nice thing about gitlab.gnome.org is that we can now have
Continuous Integration (CI) enabled for projects there. After every
commit, the CI machinery can build the project, run the tests, and
tell you if something goes wrong.
Carlos Soriano posted a "tips of the
week" mail to desktop-devel-list, and a link to how Nautilus
implements CI in Gitlab. It turns out that it's reasonably easy to
set up: you just create a .gitlab-ci.yml file in the
toplevel of your project, and that has the configuration for what to
run on every commit.
Of course instead of reading the manual, I copied-and-pasted the file from Nautilus and just changed some things in it. There is a .yml linter so you can at least check the syntax before pushing a full job.
Then I read Robert Ancell's reply about how simple-scan builds its CI jobs on both Fedora and Ubuntu... and then the realization hit me:
This lets me CI librsvg on multiple distros at once. I've had trouble with slight differences in fontconfig/freetype in the past, and this would let me catch them early.
However, people on IRC advised against this, as we need more hardware to run CI on a large scale.
Linux distros have a vested interest in getting code out of gnome.org that works well. Surely they can give us some hardware?