[Xapian-discuss] Tinderbox coverage

[Olly Betts]

Sadly sourceforge have recently announced that they've discontinued
their compile farm service (it's actually been out of operation since
an unspecified hardware failure at the very end of 2006):

https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=665363
    
I've been using this service for several years to run automated builds
of Xapian from SVN (and before that CVS):
    
http://www.oligarchy.co.uk/tinderbox/xapian/status.html

This has been very useful in helping ensure that Xapian releases build
out-of-the-box on the platforms it covers.  Also, it's usually easier to
fix a problem in new code if it's caught within a few hours while all
the details are fresh in ones mind, and with command line access to
the platform in question.

I have access to other machines for test building.  HP very kindly offer
access to a variety of platforms through their "test drive" programme:

http://www.testdrive.hp.com/

I've also managed to sign up for developer access to machines hosted by
SGI and Intel.

These cover some of the platforms sourceforge had, but the following
are no longer represented in the Xapian tinderbox:

CentOS Linux
Fedora Core
OpenBSD
Solaris on x86 and sparc
FreeBSD on alpha
Mac OS X
Linux cross build to CYGWIN

CentOS is not a great worry, since it aims to be 100% binary compatible
with RHEL, and RHEL AS and ES are both still well represented.  But it
would be good to plug some of the other gaps (especially Solaris and Mac
OS X), and indeed to add other platforms not already covered.

So if you know of anywhere I can sign up for free developer access to
additional platforms do let me know.

And if you have access to any of them and are willing to run Xapian test
builds periodically, please get in touch (off list is probably more
appropriate).

Currently the mechanism is that you install a couple of perl scripts
(probably in a specially created user account) which you run off cron to
check for new snapshot tarballs, and download and build them, returning
results by email.  Alternatively, I can drive builds from my end via
ssh, in which case the results are returned across the ssh connection.

The scripts check the load average first so you can ensure they only run
when the machine isn't otherwise busy.  Your reward is that Xapian
releases should reliably build on your platform!

Cheers,
    Olly