Setup CI

[DigitalBrains1]

This also establishes a proper cabal.project and fixes compilation with Clash 1.8.1, although there are currently still bugs in that. Before we release clash-cores, we need to either fix the following bugs, release Clash 1.10.0 and use that, or disable the problematic cores:

• Unmatchable constant as case subject clash-compiler#2806
• tuple3_0_sel0_std_logic_vector is not declared clash-compiler#2807
• Ila output test fragile #9

It was not enough to use a global unchanging cabal.project and amend that with a cabal.project.local in CI: it did not allow altering the things that needed to be altered. So I had to overwrite part of cabal.project itself.

[DigitalBrains1]

Finally, let's do some bikeshedding. I moved this to its own message so it doesn't detract from the main points in the cover letter.

The following stanza illustrates the current multi-coloured shed in all its glory:

test-suite unittests
  type: exitcode-stdio-1.0

Here we decided to simply write multiple words together (I think this was a Dunglish issue where a native Dutch speaker incorrectly writes multiple words, unit tests, as a single word, unittests). However, Cabal can't make up its mind: it says test-suite, combining multiple words with a dash, and exitcode where it just strings multiple words together. Or, rather, two words together. It then has another dash because of course.¹

However, it does explicitly spell test-suite, which makes clash-testsuite rather weird because you're mixing multiple spellings in the same .cabal file. Here, I opted to call the test suite package clash-cores-test-suite which is quite a mouth full and has lots of dashes.

And another bikeshed. I dislike the .yml extension for YAML files. The only reason for not using .yaml seems to be compatibility with filename restrictions that haven't existed for three decades in any of the platforms we use. Currently, I do use .gitlab-ci.yml because GitLab needs configuration to change that name, but I use .yaml for the GitLab include files as the doc explicitly says .yml and .yaml are the two allowed extensions. Frankly, I'm inclined to configure the GitLab repo to look for .gitlab-ci.yaml, but I kept it at the default for now.

What do people think of the spellings? test-suite? .yaml? Let the bikeshedding beginnnnn!

¹ We could "fix" this inconsistency by bumping cabal-version to 3.8, where the type property becomes the optional default, so we could remove that :-D.

[martijnbastiaan]

Bikeshedding:

• yaml
• testsuite: integration-tests? hdl-tests?
• unittests: unit-tests though this one pains me because we already Dunglish it everywhere.

[DigitalBrains1]

Quote with reply:

Bikeshedding:

• yaml
  yes. I'll make it .gitlab-ci.yaml and configure GitLab accordingly
• testsuite: integration-tests? hdl-tests?
  hdl-tests makes sense to me
• unittests: unit-tests though this one pains me because we already Dunglish it everywhere.
  I erred on the side of copy-pasting, but I do like internal consistency, I like unit-tests actually. And doc-tests, right? Right, not doctests. The only place I see that as separate words is in the module path (Test.DocTest), everywhere else people seem to consider this a single word.

[martijnbastiaan]

Yeah doctest seems to have become one word.