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?)"

not to be a jerk but...

[User 956]

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.

Maybe the project has ended because that's not where the future of computing is headed. Maybe the future is something more like "write once, run anywhere".

Vendor support...

[Lord Prox]

Naaahhhhh. Nice thought, but no computational utopia yet.
How about vendors supply compile farm gateways linked from SF.NET for use by SF members. Great way for hardware vendors to show off their new stuff to folks that might be inclined to buy or have influence in the purchase decision.

Kinda like a hands-on remote(?!) demo.

SciTechPulse. Geek News Netcast. Hot Polynesian Geek Chick Host Silulu. [scitechpulse.com]

Emulation?

[headkase]

I wonder if emulation of other hardware architectures would allow developers to try things out on their commodity machines? VMWare and Virtual PC do a good job for x86 emulation and there are many emulators for obsolete machines available so the question comes down to the time and effort required to implement new architectures. Maybe what could be practical is something along the lines of Transmeta's morphable instruction sets technology but with an extra layer of associated hardware (video, sound) emulation/translation.

Re:not to be a jerk but...

[remahl]

Hardly. The future is and has long been one of "write once, test anywhere". And that's the need the compile farm filled. Writing once and expecting it to automatically run everywhere without modifications is a pipe dream.

VMs

[krakass]

With the availability of VMWare, Xen, etc. you can have your own CompileFarm. Obviously it's not a good choice if you're trying to render an animated movie or similar, but for testing or compiling it should fulfill most of your needs.

Virtualisation negates the need for a compile farm

[Jailbrekr]

I use VMWare Workstation and Virtual PC to do testing and whatnot, negating the need for multiple systems in my home office. I have, for example, Windows XP Pro, Windows 2000 Pro, OpenBSD, FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.2 all set up as seperate virtual systems on a single computer.

Who needs a compile farm when most of what we need can be run from a single moderately decent workstation?

They announced this AFTER the shutdown?

[Animats]

Posted By: wdavison
Date: 2007-02-16 00:13
Summary: Compile Farm News

As of 2007-02-08, SourceForge.net Compile Farm service has been officially discontinued.

Shutdown on Feb. 8, announcement on Feb. 16th?

With behavior like that, SourceForge can't be considered a safe location for important code. I'd suggest that it's time to get projects off SourceForge. Make offsite backups of anything important now.

Latest announcement from VA Software [yahoo.com], which owns SourceForge:

VA Software Corp., whose software and online media are targeted for the open-source software community, said Thursday it named Scott E. Howe to its board of directors.

Howe is president of a division of digital marketing company aQuantive Inc.

"Scott's extensive knowledge of the media markets will be invaluable as we continue to focus on our core media assets and strive to secure alliances in the global competitive landscape," VA Software President and Chief Executive Ali Jenab said in a statement.

VA Software slipped a penny to close at $4.24 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

If VA Software thinks they're now a "media company", it's time to get off SourceForge.

Dummy - Slashdot IS VA Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Animats wrote:

If VA Software thinks they're now a "media company", it's time to get off SourceForge.

VA Software owns Slashdot:

http://www.ostg.com/about/index.htm [ostg.com]:

OSTG (Open Source Technology Group), formerly Open Source Development Network (OSDN), has had its roots in the technology community since its early days as the ground-breaking tech network Andover.net. Founded in 1996 with the mission to provide unbiased content, community, and commerce for the Linux and Open Source communities, Andover.net grew in community relevance and popularity by adding the provocative community-centric sites Slashdot and freshmeat.net to its technology group, and ThinkGeek and AnimationFactory.com to its e-commerce division. After its acquisition by VA Software Corp. (NASDAQ: LNUX) in early 2000 and the introduction of SourceForge.net and Linux.com, the network cemented its position as the Internet's leading destination for the Linux and Open Source community.

Ergo, VA Software is a media company.

Time to get off Slashdot.

Can we start a replacement project

[the100rabh]

Can we start a community driven project similar to Compile Farm where people with systems contribute their system time in an anonymous fashion. Something like a p2p compilation.

Re:To sum it all up: alternatives for SF Compile F

[tchuladdiass]

Even SF's compile farm wasn't all that great -- they mostly provided various x86 environments, or Linux on non-x86 hosts. The main thing I want to see in a compile farm is systems that I can't easily get ahold of -- a couple of Sun Sparc boxes, a couple flavors of IBM powerpc AIX systems, hpux (on both pa-risc and itanium), etc. Along with a good job control environment -- you supply the build and validation scripts, then the build gets run, tested and packaged on all the architectures.

Re:VMs

[that this is not und]

True, but you can test 68000 compilations on an X86 machine with Basilisk. I bet you could even run NetBSD/68k on it, if you had a LOT of free time.

Basilisk on a NetBSD/i386 box, running NetBSD/68k. Hmm. I suppose you could run it another layer deeper by running the NetBSD/i386 on bochs on a NetBSD/sparc box. Make it a SparcStation IPC just for fun.

Re:Industry moving forward

[Anonymous Coward]

I this that is mostly on the bulls eye, but you should add in the fact that there are a lot of other reasons people would rather run things locally as well. For instance:

Internet goes down? No problem, most of my business software is local (so when my neighbor runs into the cable box with his lawnmower and literally shreds my connection, I'm not screwed).

Games? Best gaming needs to happen at least mostly locally for graphics and such... can you imagine trying to play some graphics intense game like AOE III or Half Life II through a browser?

Office Suite? I really don't want to run Word (or some google word processer) over the Internet. Call me old fashioned, but I like my graphical effects, the better snappiness of the machine, and more importantly, that fact that i can keep my personal and private documents in a location I control.

The list goes on and on, but suffice it to say, while software as a service can be good for some things, I think we need to be careful not to get carried away with it and try to do everything that way. Those that are completely into it and want to do everything that way scare me.