Yea, this seems overcomplicated for something that can easily be smacked into a .travis.yml file with simple syntax.

Dream result would be what happened with RVM and RBenv merging their simple "select ruby version" files in that Travis, CircleCi, Jenkins etc. all agreed on a generic .build.yml file syntax and we could just use that.

While a standard .build.yml file sounds nice, I'm not sure we understand the problem well enough to figure out what the optimal syntax would look like. This matters because the syntax has large implications for 1) how simple your build process is 2) how much overhead your CI system can take care of, for you.

For example, at Circle, we're still experimenting with yml syntax for user-specified parallelization commands. Each different syntax we've looked at has different implications for what kinds of problems are simple, and what kinds of problems are expressible, using the syntax.

So yes, standards, but not yet :-)

Supporting a .travis.yml config file (or similar) should be relatively easy - as you mention - the multibranch stuff is probably the bigger "improvement" for Jenkins.

Ahem! The initial commit includes: https://github.com/jenkinsci/literate-api/blob/master/src/ma... however it is not completed yet ( see the comment in https://github.com/jenkinsci/literate-api/blob/master/src/ma... ) We had to prioritise which would get released first and I found the Markdown format more fun personally, so it got more love... plus you didn't give the YAML one any love either