Customizable expansion keys

Travis CI Discussions & Feedback Feature Requests
1

Travis currently offers a set of automatically-expanded keys (os, arch, env, jdk, …), whose availability depend on the build environment.
The only way an end user has for a customized build matrix is to rely on env. Say, however, that I have a custom build I want to test for all combinations of two environment variables FOO and BAR, whose possible values are respectively 1, 2, 3 and a, b, c.

As far as I know, the only way this could be currently done in Travis is by explicitly including all the combinations:

env:
  jobs:
    - FOO=1 BAR=a
    - FOO=1 BAR=b
    - FOO=1 BAR=c
    - FOO=2 BAR=a
    - FOO=2 BAR=b
    - FOO=2 BAR=c
    - FOO=3 BAR=a
    - FOO=3 BAR=b
    - FOO=3 BAR=c

is this correct?
If so, I believe it’s an important limitation on matrices.
I would propose to provide a standard way for generating expansions for environment variables.

One possibility could be:

env:
   jobs:
      - name: FOO
        values: [1, 2, 3]
      - name: BAR
        values: [a, b, c]

This would expand to a 3x3 matrix. If this tooling is introduced, a better filtering could be of use for jobs.exclude. Let’s say that we have:

env:
  jobs:
     - name: FOO
       values: [1, 2, 3]
     - name: BAR
       values: [a, b, c]
     - name: BAZ
       values: [d, e, f, g, h, i]

This is a big 3x3x6 matrix. But let’s say that when FOO=1, then only BAZ=h and BAZ=i make sense, and when FOO=2 then BAR=b.
This would make a 3x4+6+3x6 build.

 jobs:
  exclude:
    - env:
      - name: FOO
        is: 1 # is: single-value match
      - name: BAZ
        in: [h, i] # in: multi-value match
    - env:
      - name: FOO
        in: [2]  # same as is: 2
      - name: BAR
        not: [b] # reverse match

What do you think?

2