Travis CI provides an easy-to-use continuous integration infrastructure for
github repos to use. Travis will automatically test all PRs which are opened
against the rust repository, informing PR owners of the test results.
I believe that this will be a very convenient piece of infrastructure as we'll
be able to reduce the load on bors quite a bit. In theory all PRs opened have
had the full test suite run against them, but unfortunately this is rarely the
case (I'm a prime suspect). Travis will be able to provide easy and relatively
quick (~30min) feedback for PRs. By ensuring fewer failures on bors, we can
hopefully feed more successful jobs to bors.
Overall, I expect this to be very helpful for new contributors as well as
regular contributors as it's another layer of tests being run which will
hopefully catch things sooner. One of the most convenient parts about using
Travis is that there's very little burden in terms of maintenance, and if things
go wrong we can easily turn travis completely off.
Note that this is *not* the metric by which a PR will be merged with. Using
travis will purely be another source for running tests, we will continue to gate
all PRs on bors.
Alex Crichton