An update to my Elisp ERT / Travis CI setup

This post might be interesting to people who use Travis CI to test their Elisp packages.

I've noticed a few days ago that my tests on Travis CI started failing randomly. Turns out that the widely used ppa:cassou/emacs has become deprecated. It still sort of works, but sometimes apt-get update just times out, and I get a build error.

Since it was the only one that I was using, I had to find another one. I went with emacs-snapshot from ppa:ubuntu-elisp.

Here's my current .travis.yml:

language: emacs-lisp
env:
  matrix:
    - emacs=emacs-snapshot

before_install:
  - sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-elisp
  - sudo apt-get update -qq
  - sudo apt-get install -qq $emacs
  - curl -fsSkL --max-time 10 --retry 10 --retry-delay 10 https://raw.github.com/cask/cask/master/go | python

script:
  - make cask
  - make test

I've adopted one more change in the above code: EMACS is replaced by emacs. The reason for this is that both ansi-term and compile for legacy reasons set EMACS to strange values, like "24.4.91.2 (term:0.96)". So if you have in your Makefile:

EMACS ?= emacs

you're going to have a bad time. So I changed my Makefile to:

emacs ?= emacs

And now I can compile and test while inside Emacs with no issues. The only issue left is that I don't yet know which PPA I should use for a stable Emacs. Maybe someone has a suggestion.