[Development] MinGW-builds in CI system (Qt 5)

[Anttila Janne]

Koehne Kai wrote:

> Now that the big thing (CI system migration) is done, I'm wondering whether
> we can get also MinGW into the CI system for Qt 5? It's a Tier 1 platform, so
> it should really be part of the CI testing. I understand that in the past we
> didn't do it because the outdated gcc in Mingw caused quite some headache
> (crashed), but things have improved since then. It's also a somewhat slow
> platform (mingw32-make -j has still it's quirks because sometimes the debug
> and release rules touch the same file), but until we fixed that I could imagine
> we run it e.g. without tests ...
> 
> The MinGW distribution we've tested best so far is MinGW-builds:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds
> 
> MinGW-builds is featuring both a 32 bit and 64 bit compiler package, and
> ideally we should test both.
> 

We are already aware about MinGW needs related to CI system: 
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTQAINFRA-549.

However we are currently a bit limited on HW capacity, in practice we have
just half of the HW capacity what Nokia had earlier. Now that the migration
is completed, there are activities ongoing to pack and ship rest of the Brisbane
HW to Finland. Packing, air cargo, setup, OS installations etc will take some 
time, so I would assume that we have more HW capacity available in 
~1 month timeframe. 

As an intermediate step we are right now trying arrange some more HW capacity
from Digia internal cloud and other sources. However there are several 
different requests for that capacity: Windows 7 with MinGW, Windows 8 with 
MSDN 2012, Mac OSX 10.8, adding WebKit to CI system, etc, and there has been
also discussion to take "Branching for Qt 5 repositories" in use after 
Qt5 beta 2.

Since we are currently limited on capacity we cannot do all of these right now.
I'm afraid that MinGW CI support drops to that category and we need to wait
for HW from Brisbane to arrive...

--
Janne Anttila
Senior Architect - Digia, Qt
Visit us on: http://qt.digia.com