Re: non-Linux OSes

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu27 gmail com>]

Hi,

On 21/10/13 10:34, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> 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.

In Debian we build glib for several architectures (including x86, amd64,
armel/armhf, ppc, sparc...), for GNU/kFreeBSD on amd64 and x86, and for GNU/Hurd
on x86. We currently run the testsuite only on linux (and we make test suite
failures cause the build to fail).

We try to build development snapshots in experimental (though right now 2.38 is
there as we haven't had the time to fix the regressions and upload to
unstable/testing).

Build logs/status can be checked from:

https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=glib2.0&suite=unstable
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=glib2.0&suite=experimental

Even more 'unofficial' architectures are available from
http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/package.php?p=glib2.0&suite=sid

As you can see 2.36 successfully ran the tests on all those 11 linux
architectures. 2.38 needs a bit of work but I haven't had the time to look at it
yet. Help there is more than welcome! (Note that sometimes test failures are
just race conditions because the tests run on loaded/slow machines).

If a developer needs/wants access to a box for any of those architectures for
the purposes of debugging/fixing some GNOME software I may be able to help on a
case-by-case basis.

Note that we try to do the same thing (run the testsuite, make test failures
fatal) for other GNOME packages, so this doesn't just apply to glib.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Emilio