Raaz

Travis builds for Raaz

November 8, 2013 (Friday) reddit this

This post describes the structure of travis CI system in place for raaz, the cryptographic network library for Haskell that we are developing. This documents some of its tricky aspects and what more needs to be done.

If you are not familiar with travis CI please check it out. The tight integration of travis with github means every push to the repository is built and checked. What more, the system also builds every pull requests, so before merging I can be sure that stuff works. Having said that there are certain limitation of travis builds particularly in the context of raaz which I list below.

  1. The travis builds are done on an Ubuntu container. Therefore, the default builds are against whatever haskell platform comes with it. Thanks to Herbert Valerio Riedel for his write up and his Ubuntu ppa, we now build across multiple haskell platform. The instructions need to be tweaked though as they assume that repository is a single directory with the package in the root directory. I have described this in the next section. This therefore is mostly solved.

  2. Since I myself use Debian stable and travis uses Ubuntu, there is not much cross OS builds. Ideally I would want it to be built on at least few of the BSD variants.

  3. The builds happen only on one architecture, the architecture that the travis build runs on. While this is not a problem for most packages, raaz being a cryptographic library should be built across multiple architecture. Only then can we catch bugs due to endian mismatch, alignment problems (ARM in particular). This becomes all the more important when we start including architecture specific implementations of primitives.

I think (2) should be easy to solve. Someone with more BSD experience can help out on this. I think (3) is particularly difficult because we need actual hardware to test it out. One option would be to build it and run on an emulator like qemu. However, I do not know of any build system that makes this easy. On the other hand OS distributions like Debian should have solved this problem. I would like advice from some knowledgeable person here.

Multi-platform build: Raaz’s idiosyncracies.

The raaz repository is a collection of haskell packages with dependencies between them. So Riedel’s instructions do not work directly. We need to make sure that

  1. To build a package we need to be in its root directory. This involves cd’ing into the directory and essentially following Riedel’s instructions

  2. Before installing a package like raaz-hash-sha, we need to install all its dependencies within the raaz collection as those packages are not on cabal. We use make to ensure these.

I have documented most of this in the Makefile which you might want to refer to. Let me know if the documentation needs improvements.

Package version subtleties.

There is a subtle problem with dependencies that makes multi-platform builds more or less meaningless. The way we ensure that the packages are built against a platform is by setting up an appropriate cabal.config file in the directory of the package. This config file puts constraints corresponding to the platform we want to test against. I noticed that the builds are actually not installing the platform packages because of the version dependency. For example, the dependency on Quickcheck that we had was Quickcheck==2.4.*. This means that even for builds for platform 2013.2.0.0 the quick package used was Quickcheck-2.4.something. For this reason we had to go for a more liberal package version bounds (merge ac0ad7). As long as we are not using the packages like base or Quickcheck in a non-standard way, I think we are fine.