This was one of those adventures where you find a problem and it snowballs from there.

I wanted to use barrier which is a tool for sharing mouses between computers. It is a fork of Synergy, which had gone commercial.

So, I noticed on their GitHub repo that the builds for various platforms was inconsistent. OK, maybe I can help fix their CI systems.

More worringly, there was some Appveyor CI system configured. It was not configured with the appveyor.yml method and the build process was non-transparent. It was also failing.

My current CI system of choice for open source projects is Microsoft’s Azure Pipelines. For open source projects on GitHub, they’ll provide 10 parallel jobs of Mac, Linux, and Windows. Mac and Windows usually only show up as premium options or are severely rate-limited. As far as I can tell, whatever cluster Microsoft has created for their service, it’s really not limited by capacity.

The good news is that they were fans of it and I was able to move them. It’s still a work in progress. The work done here has draw in some general “improve the ecosystem” enhancements which I will elaborate on in future posts.