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Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm?
cronie writes "Not long ago, SourceForge.net announced the shutdown of the Compile Farm — a collection of computers running a wide variety of OSes, available for compiling and testing open source projects. SF.net stated their resources 'are best used at this time in improving other parts' of the service. I consider this sad news for the OSS community, because portability is one of the strengths of OSS, and not many of us have access to such a variety of platforms to compile and test our software on. As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they can't get access to. Are there any sound alternatives with at least some popular OS/hardware combinations? Any plans to create one? (Perhaps Google or IBM might come up with something?)"
Get your software packaged by Debian (which you probably want to do anyway), and it will get built on (currently) 15 architectures of GNU/Linux, along with 3 non-Linux architectures (kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64, hurd-i386), with more popping up occasionally.
It's rarely about getting stuff going on a platform, but rather making sure nothing regresses. Compile farms are useful for doing the following:
- compiling the software on all platforms
- running automated test suite
- automatically building packages periodically
- determining what percentage of the code your test suite covers
- verifying the built package works
Patches from users cant reproduce all of these things, and this is where compile farms come in handy. Whether it makes sense for something like sourceforge is another matter.
http://www.testdrive.hp.com/
HP dude Bdale Garbee has said HP is delighted if people use testdrive to test their code on different architecture and OS combinations.
I can donate hardware and sysadmin man-hours, but I need either space, electricity, and bandwidth or money (which can obviously get me space, power, and bandwidth). I have lots of platforms just sitting in storage, and I plan to ebay most of it unless someone can get help for an interesting and useful project like this. The architectures I can provide are as follows:
4x Sgi o2 (MIPS both R10k and r5k) currently running IRIX, but I could install Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD
Compaq with Xeons (eight way SMP 4GB RAM) Debian or FreeBSD
Sun (four way SPARC64 SMP 2GB RAM) running Solaris, but I could install Linux
Sgi octane2 (MIPS R14k 1GB RAM) IRIX
HP visualize J6700 (dual SMP PA-RISC64 4GB RAM) running Debian, could install HP-UX
HP precision book (PA-RISC32) running HP-UX, could install Linux or OpenBSD
Sun (SPARC64) running OpenBSD, could install Linux or Solaris
Plenty of boring x86 machines, some older PA-RISC32 junk, and probably other RISC boxen that I forgot about....
Send an email to
unixclan
REMOVE THIS IF YOU ARE NOT A BOT
@
gmail.com
If you think you can help me host an alternative compile farm.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
The openSUSE Build Service: http://opensuse.org/Build_Service (supporting Mandriva, Debian, openSUSE, SLED, SLES, Ubuntu, Fedora...).
sourceforge has been having increasing numbers of problems recently. Their shell service for instance was down for weeks not too long back. That's happened many times over the last few years, and it's been a source of real problems, since its the only way to get access to update projects.
Their entire service was off-line for a while last week, not fun.
I've moved my project to google code project hosting. Their service is simpler, but reliable. The addition of a wiki is really helpful, and uploading new releases is trivially easy.
google could offer a compile farm with ease. I expect it won't be long now that sourceforge have removed theirs.
When I first started using sourceforge four years ago I liked the service, but when they moved to having paying customers, everything started to decline for the free hosted projects. They said it wouldn't but it still occurred.
I'm of the opinion that sourceforge got too complex, and now they can't manage all the aspects they wanted to include. No doubt if everyone paid it would be easier, but not many open source developers have free funds for such things. If people had to pay then small incomplete projects might not even get off the ground. Mine certainly wouldn't have, since I was a student, and financially limited.
You're thinking of testdrive. My friend used to run that site. They have lots of machines you can telnet into and compile on.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin