Azure releases

[ozgurakgun]

Azure Pipelines seems like a good option to replace travis+appveyor.

I just cannot get the Windows build to go through yet, the version of bash they have on that Windows image is broken in funny ways. Or probably I don't understand it.

We can automate the release process as well, and hopefully can make more frequent releases thanks to that. If anybody want to have a look or help, see the azure-pipelines branch.

[ozgurakgun]

Testing is done. Azure runs the long-running tests on linux and max now. We keep travis for testing different optimisation levels on the quick tests.

Automating releases is the next thing.

[MHHenriksen]

And as a smaller increment, artifacts from the latest successful build. There's 2GB of storage for free.

I've had a lot of fun playing with Conjure for modeling Sudoku with variant rules lately, but there's a lot of limitations in 2.3.0 that (I think) have been fixed since. So I've tried various ways of building using free cloud dev envs like Codespaces, repl.it, Google Cloud Build and so on, but they all hit a breaking point, most often running out of memory, and I'm too ADHD to do it the boring way of building on my own laptop 🤪

[ozgurakgun]

I agree a new release is needed - coming soon! And I also agree that we need the latest binaries available for download easily. I’ll look into this asap. Thanks! -- Özgür Akgün

[MHHenriksen]

Yay ❤️ Looking forward to it!

There's about a 1% chance (for opportunity and energy while being a toddler's parent) I can pitch in and set up individual build jobs for the solvers. I actually sat down at my laptop yesterday eating my own words, and tinkered with a local container dev env while multitasking Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, and the thing that took the most time was just incrementally installing all the build tools needed for Conjure itself as well as Savile Row and all the solvers (including remembering Python 2 is a thing, needed for Z3).

Which also means two more things: I got my up to date binaries already, and I have that list of packages which is useful in and of itself. I'll dig it up later, and maybe even cook a small PR with just some precondition checks with clearer and more helpful feedback in the various build scripts (since I feel having that info up front works better than trial and error).

[ott2]

Just a quick comment on Z3: recent versions support Python 3 (4.3.2 seems to have added support). Editing etc/build/install-z3.sh to replace python with python3 should work if python does not call python3 on your system. (Yes, we should fix our script.)