[contributor experience] CI often fails for non-committers

[marcdumais-work]

(inspired from a gitter interaction)

As per Travis's documentation, PRs from non-committers (i.e. with no write access to repo) do not benefit from encrypted environment variables for their Travis CI jobs. We use such a variable, GITHUB_TOKEN, so that Travis CI jobs are authenticated and have a higher API rate limit.

If we could somehow get rid of the need to download stuff during post-install of npm dependencies, in particular ripgrep, we would not have a need for the higher GH API rates, for PRs from committers and non, alike. I imagine it's not a "warm and fuzzy" experience to contribute to a project, when CI can't be trusted to approximately work.

Could we build and package ripgrep for the 3 platforms and publish those as npm packages? These could then be cached for Travis, I think? Any other ideas how we could fix this?

[marcdumais-work]

work-around: one can setup Travis CI integration on one's fork of a repo, such as theia. It's possible to configure Travis to trigger on PR creation/modification or even I think on a branch modification alone. In any case, the CI setup on one's fork can serve as an alternative during patch development development.

At a point a PR is opened on the main theia repo, where CI may fail because of the lack of a GH token. If that happens, pointing reviewers to a successful CI job on one's fork, containing the same commits, will go a long way.

[tsmaeder]

@marcdumais-work If we cannot fix the problem, can we make sure that this issue is documented in a place where contributors can find it when their build fails? For example link this issue on the failure page of travis CI?

[marcdumais-work]

@tsmaeder maybe we could add a note in our PR template about this?

[tom-shan]

I found that vscode-ripgrep will download ripgrep package to /tmp/vscode-ripgrep-cache-1.2.4/, maybe we can add this directory to cache directories list in .travis.yml.

[tom-shan]

This is the PR: #5373
I don't know why travis ci didn't create a new cache for PR 5373 ( https://travis-ci.org/theia-ide/theia/caches ), but I have tested the cache function of /tmp/vscode-ripgrep-cache-1.2.4 directory using my private repo.