Travis CI jobs fail intermittently

[boonebgorges]

See eg ​https://travis-ci.org/buddypress/BuddyPress/builds/55855308 and ​https://travis-ci.org/buddypress/BuddyPress/jobs/55855318

I've done some futzing around and here's what I've found. It appears that the failures are always on the WP 3.7 builds. When running more verbose versions of the builds (using grunt --force), it turns out that the errors are coming from WordPress database errors during the PHPUnit multisite tests. These errors crop up when a blog is created; our test suite builds the new tables as temp tables, but MySQL can't reference the same temp table twice in a single query. See ​http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=7742 and elsewhere for more details. WP fixed this in ​[WP26252] ​#WP26102, but it remains unfixed in WP 3.7. (The specific cause, for posterity's sake, is the $wpdb->suppress_errors( false ) call in install_blog().)

In any case, it appears that these errors cause intermittent failures on Travis. I'm not sure why it doesn't always fail - it might have to do with the fact that our multisite tests are run concurrently with the non-multisite tests (grunt.async()), which causes race conditions with the "suppress" flag.

I played with some tricky fixes for the problem, but they're all really weird and not worth the effort. I don't think there is really a good fix here, other than (a) live with the failures, or (b) drop WP 3.7 from the test matrix. I suppose this ticket should be closed as wontfix for that reason, but I did want to document the chain of causes before it slips away from my aging mind.

[DJPaul]

We don't test on 3.6 either despite that being our minimum support version (per ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress/), so I don't mind if we don't test on 3.7, but if we do, I'd like to bump the minimum version up to 3.8 just so we don't make false promises about future compatibility.

[boonebgorges]

That seems fine to me, but I'd strongly prefer to wait until after 2.3 is out to make this decision, so that WP compatibility is set at the beginning of the dev cycle.

[tw2113]

I think we should bring this back up for discussion, as we just finished up with 2.6 and are in the early stages of 2.7

[netweb]

Replying to boonebgorges:

... It appears that the failures are always on the WP 3.7 builds.
...
(a) live with the failures, or (b) drop WP 3.7 from the test matrix. I suppose this ticket should be closed as wontfix for that reason

BuddyPress ​dropped support for WordPress 3.7 August 6, 2015.

Closing this as wontfix per the above reasons