Hello,
To make the project easier to hack on and be maintained by non Mozilla employees, we started last week experimenting with GitHub Actions as a way to decouple from TaskCluster. This is something we started to share about a few months ago on GitHub issue https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/issues/3317 and some people shared feedback related to GitLab CI, which was valuable.
The reasoning to select GitHub Actions was focused on making sure the project is forkable and ownable without a huge rework of CI. Specifically, the setup based on Mozilla TaskCluster depends on specific workers for several platforms, including macOS, Windows and Linux ARMv7 as well as ARM64, manually maintained by Mozilla employees. So the key factor was the availability of hosted instances and self-contained management within the GitHub ecosystem.
As of https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/commit/d425838877f0f25b02e9ae722cb4bfdda9a01d76 we have started switching with a first workflow for supporting macOS / amd64, providing the library as well as C++ binary and testing that binary. It also includes Python and NodeJS package builds (without tests).
It is really important that people who have an interest in the project try and start hacking around that. If you have a PR open which does not have CI coverage, or if you were thinking of contributing, now is a good time to take a look at the new system and let us know how it works or doesn’t work for you. There’s many bits of the previous TaskCluster CI that will need rework, it’s also the perfect moment to ensure we write something that is understood and maintainable by others.
We want to take the limited time we have available to help as much as people onboard on this work ; either on Discourse, or Matrix: https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#machinelearning:mozilla.org
So, please read and hack !