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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.

1 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. 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