Add TravisCI integration to test the build with rust nightly

[thachmai]

No description provided.

[mathall]

Hi thachmai,
This seems like a small thing which probably couldn't hurt (much), but still I'd like to ask. Since I'm not very familiar with TravisCI, could you tell me who would be benefitting from this, and in what way?

[thachmai]

There's really not much downside to it. You just hook it up once to TravisCI and basically you can forget about it (CI = continuous integration; a system that does building and testing the project for you).

Afterwards, everytime you push something to github branch, TravisCI will build the project for you using Rust nightly and then run the test. It'll report errors if any so you know if something is up.

Who would be benefitting from this?

Mainly you, since you gain a degree of confidence that the project builds and succeeds outside of your dev environment.
Furthermore, a TravisCI badge helps to assure downloader/contributor of the project that the project is at least tested to some degree.

[mathall]

I looked into TravisCI the other day and it looks like an interesting service, though perhaps mainly if you're then deploying on Heroku or something. As simply an integration service I fail to see how it's very helpful if it's not preventing bad commits from landing in the first place. Granted, the "outside of your dev environment" is a good argument, except I'll still be ensuring things build everywhere before integrating on mainline.
Still you're right, there's not much downside to it. If it was set up to build on both linux and mac and then run tests reliably, I wouldn't mind using it. Unfortunately some tests are a bit flaky, and I rather avoid the annoyance of false negatives, so we'd first need to either "un-flake" those tests or find a way to single them out and not have them run by TravisCI.