[SunRescue] Anyone need some computing time or shell?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, March 16, 2001 at 03:04:38 (-0600), Reagen Ward wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Anyone need some computing time or shell?
>
> Overall, I'm amazed at the open source development community's utter
> lack of interest in producing portable code.

Yeah, things out there kind of suck sometimes.

I myself would love to have regular shell access to more kinds of
machines for my own smail, newsyslog, fingerd; as well as a whole huge
number of other people's projects that I offer patches back to (I always
want to make sure my patches are portable).

My own lab is now entirely NetBSD (with its own porting fun!), and the
range of different machines I have access to at various client sites, as
well as those of my colleagues has also dwindled.  (I really only have
access to other *BSDs and a few variants of Solaris now.)

I keep thinking of pulling my 3B2 out of the garage and booting it up so
I can port things back to SysVr3.2, but I'm not sure there's any value
in that and besides it'd be very slow (like most of the non-intel/sparc
machines that I have).

I would have used the Sourceforge compile farm to test my recent smail
release on Linux (it apparently doesn't compile clean any more), but
apparently you can't just sign up -- you have to have a project on
Sourceforge.  I could probably ask some of my Linux-using friends for
access, but it's often an imposition....

One of the issues with doing porting on other people's machines is
indeed sometimes the inability to install other tools and perhaps
dependent packages.  Often there are also issues with wanting to have a
clean OS install to be certain that none of the add-ons or
administrative changes are affecting the build or performance, and of
course fresh installs of most systems are very insecure so not the best
things to offer remote access to.

The final issue which I've faced until very recently is the limit of my
own connectivity.  Transfering archives, editiing, debugging, running
CVS, etc., etc., etc., across slow links is often a royal pain and
deters many people from working remotely.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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