Stages and steps need clarification for the end user

[karthik]

tic embraces this concept. Each stage has a name (e.g., "after_success", "deploy", ...) and has an arbitrary number of steps.

The documentation needs to address how a user makes sense of after_success and say deploy. e.g. if a user were to use this to build package docs with pkgdown, then on success, they would include the recipe to "deploy" the docs to a branch. Then where does deploy come into play since we just deployed under after_success. This type of ambiguity needs clarification since we cannot assume the end user understands these stages.

[krlmlr]

• function that emulates a Travis/Appveyor run
• reduce steps to lcd between Travis/Appveyor
• flow chart?
• figure in the middle of http://ctlente.com/en/purrr-magic/: .travis.yml -> tic.R -> code

deploy: failure aborts build
after_success: failure does nothing

• introductory video

• assume existing user with knowledge about Travis CI and .travis.yml

[maelle]

A flow chart would be really useful (for this but also in general actually, so probably several flowcharts?).

[maelle]

When I say in general I mean the general concept of using GitHub and Travis CI to deploy "stuff".

[krlmlr]

We could point users new to Travis CI to e.g. http://mahugh.com/2016/09/02/travis-ci-for-test-automation/.

The "build lifecycle" is described at https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/customizing-the-build#The-Build-Lifecycle, but they don't have a flow chart and the description isn't particularly detailed (e.g. it doesn't explain that failures in after_install etc. don't trigger a failed build). I couldn't find anything similar for AppVeyor. Maybe upstream needs better documentation too.

I have created https://github.com/krlmlr/ci-lifecycle to test various failure modes in the Travis CI and AppVeyor lifecycles, this repo could also host a more detailed description and the flow charts.

[krlmlr]

Build in the ci-lifecycle repo: https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/ci-lifecycle/builds/397482622

[krlmlr]

Closing in favor of #57, which contains the structure of a new vignette to be written. Happy to continue discussion there.

[krlmlr]

#57 incorporates most of the topics discussed here, some are solved already.