[Mono-dev] Public MonkeyWrench (wrench.mono-project.com) retiring

[Jo Shields]

Hi all

We will be (maybe have already done? I should check) shutting down
wrench.mono-project.com imminently.

This is the public instance of our in-house CI tool, MonkeyWrench
(https://github.com/mono/monkeywrench).

Wrench has many functions which make it a great CI system for certain
situations, but it has a few inherent design issues which make it
problematic as a CI solution for publicly developed Open Source projects
- critically it has no real way to operate on anything other than a
sequentially updated version control system, so can't be used to test
contributor pull requests. And since it's an in-house tool, the cost of
maintenance is high (any changes we need to make to Wrench mean taking
an engineer off other things that users might care more about, like
64-bit OSX support).

Over the last... wow, over a year... we have been gradually moving the
services provided by public Wrench to our public Jenkins instance, at
jenkins.mono-project.com. Jenkins is not without its problems, but it is
much more flexible than Wrench, and better suited to a project with
community contributions. We also have spent time on patching or writing
Jenkins plugins where required for an experience more useful to our
engineers and the community at large.

If you have any questions about this migration, the mailing list or IRC
are good ways to catch one of the relevant people.