[Cuis] Did we drop PNG support?

[Frank Shearar]

On 20 December 2013 14:36, Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org> wrote:
> On 12/20/2013 11:04 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
>>
>> I don't care for JPEG, *ever.* For the record. My thinking was PNG support
>> and that's it, but I can see now why you decided against using it
>> (compression.)
>
>
> Oh, but I am not against using it! It is the best option in many situations.
> I just think it is better for the kernel not to depend on it.
>
>> I didn't know that BMP actually supported transparency. Yes, that will do
>> nicely (I don't care much for GIF either, though sometimes the animated ones
>> can be kind of a fun retro laugh.)
>
>
> Given that we have an external package for this stuff, bringing back GIF it
> might be a good idea.
>
>> I'm okay with getting rarely used image formats out of the core of the
>> system, FWIW. I worry with having this stuff outside the image we usually
>> develop in that we'll break stuff and not notice it though. Maybe soonish
>> would be a good time to do some kind of continuous integration set up. That
>> would help to ensure external packages keep working. An adventure for
>> another day though.
>
>
> I'm not sure of the value of a continuous integration server. But I usually
> do stuff for Cuis updates in an image with all the "official" packages
> loaded, so I reduce the risk of breaking them. Sometimes, when committing
> updates, I also need to update some package.

On every commit, CI runs your entire test suite. When things fail, you
immediately know which commit broke the test, which gives you much
less code (hopefully) to analyse, to find the breakage. CI is all
about closing the feedback loop.

Further, in GitHub's case, you can use Travis CI to handle the CI
part. Because the test suite runs against every commit, a pull request
will be validated (or not), and Travis CI can update the pull
request's commit status. This gives you, the reviewer of the pull
request, a green/red light, telling you that the PR doesn't break
anything.

(For the seriously pedantic, the thing you _really_ want is to merge
the PR into the master and run the test suite on that. _That_ green
light should inform the commit status of the PR. Alas, no one actually
does that.)

frank