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SourceForge Announces Compile Farm

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-render-to-compile dept.

HeUnique sent us the NewsAlert press release regarding SourceForge's new compile farm. For the projects hosted there, it means that they will be able to do test compiles on both Linux and *BSD systems.

6 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Writing Portable Software by howardjp · · Score: 4

    This leads me to an interesting problem. I am developing a program. I am using FreeBSD as my development enviroment but my target environments are BSD/OS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SunOS, and possibly UnixWare. Obviously, anything else would be great on top of this. But how does one write code that will compile without problems across so many different architectures and platforms? Is autoconf the way to go? Is there a decent manual on autoconf? The standard documentation that comes with it is a bit lacking in how to make it work with a new project. Ideas?

    1. Re:Writing Portable Software by Arandir · · Score: 4

      Autoconf is only a small part of the problem. So small that I'm tempted to say it's not even necessary. Autoconf will detect what's available for you on a system, but it won't write your code.

      The best way to write a program that will work on any Unix is simply not to write one for Linux only :-) No, I'm not being flippant. Write according to the Unix standards. Use POSIX and avoid Linux-only kernel calls. Use standard C and avoid the extensions in glibc.

      And finally, don't make the same mistake millions of other developers make every day, don't assume that the user has exactly the same system and setup that you do. Don't assume that the user has a large monitor or lots of memory. Don't assume that they have an active connection to the net. Don't assume that home directories are under /home.

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      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  2. Other Unices? by Stephen · · Score: 4

    This is a good start, but it really needs other Unices than the free ones to be included. Have you tried compiling a C program under SunOS 4 recently? Or HP-UX 9? These are where the real compatibility issues are revealed, IME.

    (Of course, compiling under Windows/Mac/BeOS/etc. too would be even better, for programs which are intended to be used there.)

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  3. What architectures? by Oskuro · · Score: 4

    I didn't have a look at SF.net yet to read about this, but I'm already wondering if it will be a i386-only farm or Sparc, Alpha, PPC, etc. will be available.
    Many bugs in the Debian Bugtracking system are "fail to compile under foo arch" bugs, so it would be very cool to be able to test the code under various archs to avoid this. That would make SourceForge a unique environment to squash these types of problems, as many programmers can be aware their code does not compile on Sparc but they can't do anything about it as they don't have access to a Sparc machine.

    About being able to execute binaries, and X and all... that sounds a bit more difficult here, imagine what hardware you need to allow that number of X sessions?

  4. Re:Shell or Web? by dtype · · Score: 4
    There is full shell access to the machines. Linux distributions can be switched on the fly with canned chroot scripts.

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    Drew Streib, dtype.org

  5. Features, Current and Future by dtype · · Score: 5

    I see a lot of questions regarding what is available on the Compile Farm, and a lot of great ideas as well. I'd like to dispel a couple of myths and offer some insight as to where this is going as well.

    First, this is not a web-only service. We do like to provide web interfaces to as much as possible, but we do realize that for some things, program compliation and testing included, nothing can substitute for shell access.

    A lot of people are asking about other hardware architectures and OS's. For now, the Compile Farm is i386 based, and contains several Linux distributions and FreeBSD. This does not mean that we have ruled out other possibilities. This is just another step in what we hope can be an expanding feature set for Open Source developers on SourceForge.

    There is a lot of setup involved in something like this Compile Farm, not the least of which is having thousands of skilled Open Source developers with shell accounts on a set of boxes. We're attempting to keep things as secure as possible while also offering enough features to make this thing useful. One reason for the limited number of distributions/architectures/OS's now is the limitation of variables in a very complex system. Hopefully, we can work out the kinks in this system soon so that it can become a valuable resource to developers who might not otherwise have the capability of getting their hands on so many different machines.

    We're also working on giving users the advantages ot having a cluster of machines available. Uriah Welcome worked very hard to provide parallel make capability to projects, and this is being tested now. (Parallel makes will allow you to take advantage of multiple dual-processor machines simultaneously in your compiles.)

    Please be patient as we test this new system. We're definately open to criticism, but please also be constructive with it so that we can continue to improve these services. Thanks to all of the SourceForge users who have contributed patches, criticism, and helpful suggestions. Every day my confidence in the Open Source model increases...

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    SourceForge Programmer Type - http://sourceforge.net

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    Drew Streib, dtype.org