Jenkins Job for Testing Against Newest Downstream Libraries

[SteveBronder]

Description

From some comments @bgoodri made on Discourse, it could be nice for us and downstream maintainers if we ran a jenkins job on dev->master that used the newest versions of Eigen, Boost, etc. These would be set to warnings and not actual errors. Once we figure out if it's us or them that's goofing up we can report to maintainers as appropriate.

This could pull either their dev or most recent release.

I'm pretty sure we also lag behind the latest version for most things, so we can set these tests to run when the current release version is greater than the one we use. Then we can use these tests to also know if it's fine to update the dependencies.

Layout

For the Jenkins job

1. Download newest versions of Eigen, boost etc. to libraries folder
2. Connect those properly to libraries file
3. Run tests (all or some or ???)
4. Have a report (or something legible) generated in the output

Dunno if we should test each individually or all at once or whatever.

Expected Output

We could be very fancy and have Jenkins post an issue or something, but a simple alt is just to have the test failures available via the Jenkins console.

If people think this is useful and good I can probably spend a bit of time working on it.

[bob-carpenter]

Thanks---that sounds like a good idea. We'll likely run into parse errors. Testing individually will be most informative, but it may be too high a burden.

[rok-cesnovar]

Is this issue still relevant with the build with parameters thing we have now?

[SteveBronder]

Which thing is that?

[rok-cesnovar]

Ah I misunderstood this issue. I thought this was an issue on how to test cmdstan with specific branches on Math with newer libraries, nevermind. This one is trying to actually automatically use the newest library. sorry.