Travis CI adds support for testing your projects on Windows | Hacker News Reader

Travis CI adds support for testing your projects on Windows

blog.travis-ci.com

52 pointscookiestack4 comments

Travis has weird priorities. The Ubuntu environment has been stuck on Precise/Trusty for years now. And the only place you can upload artifacts is Amazon S3. I really hate to be that person who sees a new offering and is like "but when will you fix your busted junk?!" but.. when will you fix your busted junk?!

I came here to raise this exact criticism. It’s gradually become a thorn in my side which as of late has begin to erode my general good will towards TravisCI and steering me away from paying TravisCI for anything, by way of now that I’m paying for basic services elsewhere because TravisCI doesn’t do what I want, I’ll just pay slightly more to get their premium services for my non open source and/or professional repositories.

It feels sort of like they are just “coasting” on their past momentum. It’s clear they aren’t, since they are doing things, as this very blog post attests, but not the sorts of things people profess to want.

Yeah, this and a couple other reasons have caused me to jump ship (slow boot times, weird config, glitchy UI, plenty of deploy integrations but individually limited, too much downtime e.g. today Travis had trouble talking to S3 for a while). They're constantly improving which is great but after using them for 2+ years, it was time to leave. Plenty of great alternatives out there. Circle CI, Buildkite, Jenkins, Bamboo.

It doesn't look like they put any thought into how to make this appeal to Windows devs. One would have expected support for using PowerShell for scripts. Instead, they use git bash (which is definitely less familiar to Windows devs than even cmd) and one has to use `pwsh -c` which adds tons of pitfalls around quoting, error handling, multi-line scripts etc. I also would have expected a way to specify choco packages to install like you can specify apt-get packages, instead you need to shell out. These are very obvious things (just look at AppVeyor and VSTS/Azure DevOps pipelines) that they could have easily done.

It just looks like second-class integration to me, something to appeal to cross-platform projects that want to easily run their tests on Windows, but nothing serious for pure Windows devs. This is nice for open source projects, but it means for them that they have to pay a lot more for resources, without having increased their target user base to get more revenue. They're missing an opportunity.

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