non-Linux OSes

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi,

GLib aims to work on a wide range of operating systems, but we have no
good story for ensuring that this is the case.  Mostly we do things for
Linux and, if they are the sort of thing that may cause problems, we
also check that they work on Windows.  We read manpages and make sure
that the functions we are using are in the proper POSIX specs, but this
is not always a fool-proof process.

We want to improve this situation.

Dan recently started by doing some patches to pull out ancient support
for OSes like OS/2 and BeOS.

We have brainstormed a list of platforms that we think that we want to
support and it looks like so:  Linux, {Free,Net,Open}BSD,
(Open?)Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Hurd, Darwin, mingw(32/64), MSVC.

There is also the question of non-standard compilers (icc?).

What we don't have are the resources to setup routine testing of GLib
against these target operating systems.  Some of these operating systems
are not Free Software.

What would be nice is if we could gain access to some machines (from
various projects) that we could use for testing GLib and/or if we could
get a VM farm setup on GNOME infra that various projects would help us
to setup (and maintain) their OSes on.

I don't have any concrete ideas here, but it seems like there are some
good options.  If anyone has ideas or offers of help, they are greatly
appreciated.

Cheers