GNU Make is an open source and free build automation tool.
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Travis CI
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Travis CI is an open source continuous integration platform, that enables users to run and test simultaneously on different environments, and automatically catch code failures and bugs.
GNU Make is a great tool for simple builds where language-specific options are not available, or to provide shortcuts for common commands (e.g., "make build" as shorthand for "go build ..." with a bunch of flags). However, it is complementary to other build systems. It does not replace them, which is perhaps one of its greatest strengths as well (works with existing ecosystem instead of trying to do everything). GMU Make it simple to get started with, and the philosophy of understanding how sources map to outputs, as well as the dependency graph, are beneficial.
TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.
I think they could have a cheaper personal plan. I'd love to use Travis on personal projects, but I don't want to publish them nor I can pay $69 a month for personal projects that I don't want to be open source.
There is no interface for configuring repos on Travis CI, you have to do it via a file in the repo. This make configuration very flexible, but also makes it harder for simpler projects and for small tweaks in the configuration.
TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.
In general, it is fair to say the support is sufficient although we do not deal with support directly. There are a lot of forum people chiming in with suggestions or recommendations of particular usage or issues we run into. Since it is open software, patch and fixes will be available from time to time. A lot of information is available in the web now for knowing GNU Make from learning, example, teaching, etc.
After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.
I'm a full-stack developer that has used various build tools, including Maven, Gradle, and NPM/yarn. For our C projects, I also investigated CMake and Ninja, but they seemed more difficult to learn and more tedious to work with. GNU Make is a single binary that can be easily downloaded, even for Windows under MingW32, is straightforward to learn, and works pretty well despite its age.
Jenkins is much more complicated to configure and start using. Although, one you have done that, it's extremely powerful and full of features. Maybe many more than Travis CI. As per TeamCity, I would never go back to using it. It's also complicated to configure but it is not worth the trouble. Codeship supports integration with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket. I've only used it briefly, but it seems to be a nice tool.
It's improved my ability to deliver working code, increasing my development velocity.
It increases confidence that your own work (and those of external contributors) does not have any obvious bugs, provided you have sufficient test coverage.
It helps to ensure consistent standards across a team (you can integrate process elements like "go lint" and other style checks as part of your build).
It's zero-cost for public/open source projects, so the only investment is a few minutes setting up a build configuration file (hence the return is very high).
The .travis.yml file is a great way for onboarding new developers, since it shows how to bootstrap a build environment and run a build "from scratch".
