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Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm?

Posted by kdawson on from the in-search-of-iron dept.

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?)"

4 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Virtualisation negates the need for a compile f by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's not much use for testing compiling on Solaris on SPARC64, or Tru64 on Alpha, etc...

  2. Re:They announced this AFTER the shutdown? by Animats · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It was announced afterwards for a reason. They're not really taking it down because nobody wants it or anything, it's because they lack manpower to keep it working. It basically needs a lot of work to get it back in a usable state, and it's not widely used, so they're just dropping it.

    This is the classic downside of "software as a service".

  3. Re:Industry moving forward by Excelcia · · Score: 4, Insightful
    And what is the client running? A web browser running on machine with an OS. So, you need compiler, programming, and testing infrastructure for:
    • The application provider's OS
    • The application provider's network services
    • The application
    • The client's OS
    • The client's network client
    And this is supposed to be a less complicated system to write, distribute, and debug than traditional systems that you can do away with traditional compile-farms? Software is a service, no need to install anything. Unless, of course, you want to print something. Or is that a service too? Burning a DVD is a service? Put your DVD-R in the drive, connect to your favourite DVD authoring service, and... go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow your disc will be done. Unless DVD or HD-DVD quality video is something you expect to get solely off broadband.

    There are so many exceptions to what software-as-a-service can reasonably do that the majority of people who are reading this do on a daily basis that I just have to laugh when people bring this up. Beyond a wet dream for Microsoft where they lovingly sit back and watch the monthly subscription dollars roll in, this is never going to happen.
  4. Re:VMs by Curtman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The SF.net CompileFarm was not there to provide 'power'.

    I believe he meant this kind of power. ;)