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?)"

Comments

99.9%

[Duncan3]

If you want to cater to 99.% of users, you target Win32, Linux, and OS X. Xcode does x86+PPC for you without any work so that doesnt matter. Windows and Linux are trivial to throw into a VM, which is handy.

So you setup an Intel Mac, VM Win/Linux, write Python, Perl, PHP, or C, to minimize the testing needed and you're done. Add another 3-5 flavors of Linux because the various distributions are complete assh*les and can't standardize on all the libraries of course, so your code won't run on Redhat and SUSE without tweaks. Or just forget Linux and be happy with 99%.

Back even 10 years ago that list would have been 20 systems, not 3.