Build Checks are run even when Inconsequential files are changed

[NauticalMile64]

Expected/Desired Behavior or Experience:

The build system skips prs where no source code files were modified.

Actual Behavior:

I just noticed when I submitted pr #54 that the system is running the build tests (and I assume it's going to run coveralls and the benchmark tests afterward). The only change I made was to a documentation (.md) file. I know the consequences for us (the maintainers) are minimal, but this seems like a poor use of public resources.

Steps to Reproduce the Actual Behavior:

Submit a pr with only documentation changes.

[louis-langholtz]

Agreed. I'd looked into this before too.

[skip ci] or [ci skip] can manually be used within git commit messages to skip CI building (for both CI systems).

AppVeyor has a web page on commits filtering. It says [skip appveyor] in the commit message will skip AppVeyor builds.

I think we'd both prefer a more automatic approach though that filtered based on pre-configured file names that are configured in the appveyor.yml file. AppVeyor has that capability (see previous link). Unfortunately, Travis-CI doesn't currently seem to have support for this (see Exclude files from triggering a build).

So not sure where to go with this for the moment except to add filtering for AppVeyor and just have to live with Travis-CI continuing for now.

[NauticalMile64]

@louis-langholtz Alright, that makes sense. I didn't notice those tags before. I'll use them for docs changes from now on. I'll leave it up to you whether to close this issue or not.

[louis-langholtz]

I like this issue and want to keep it open. I'll update the AppVeyor config file to filter some file changes out for now and then keep this open till I do the same for Travis-CI (after Travis-CI makes something like this available).

[louis-langholtz]

Also note that doc changes may still have need or want of being CI managed like for building/updating the gh-pages branch after every PR. Just something else I need to keep in mind about this issue.

[louis-langholtz]

I'm thinking that Travis-CI runs for more branches than it needs to. Perhaps .travis.yml file needs to be updated to un-comment the branches: only: info.

[louis-langholtz]

Closing this now. If/when Travis-CI updates its filtering capacity this should get revisited again.