A virtual machine for testers?

[Janus Weil]

Hi Damian,

> A virtual machine with occasionally updated and patched versions of the
> gfortran development branch might be one way to address the comments
> I made recently about the hurdles associated with building from source.
>
> I would be glad to create the virtual machine and host it at
> www.sourceryinstitute.org.  Whenever developers have big new features
> they want tested, they could download the virtual machine, update the
> source, apply the relevant patch, build and install a patched gfortran binary,
> and upload the virtual machine for testers to download.  Anything that
> lowers barrier to building might increase the community of pre-commit
> testers.

if you would be willing to set up (and maintain) such a VM, that would
surely be a helpful facility for people to test recent trunk builds or
uncommitted patches.

OTOH, regular trunk builds for various platforms are already available
and probably cover a large fraction of the usage cases of such a VM
(minus patches, but those usually make it into trunk quite quickly,
with some recent counterexamples though).

As an alternative (or addition) to your proposal: Since you mentioned
that you had trouble building GCC from source, how about setting up a
simple step-by-step guide to building GCC, which explains how to avoid
the common pitfalls etc?

In principle there is extensive documentation about building GCC at
http://gcc.gnu.org/install/, but there are frequent complaints that it
is too lengthy/complicated and not suitable for beginners. Some
attempts for a more compact quick-guide have been made e.g. at
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/InstallingGCC and probably other places. What
you could do is to help extend/improve that or set up your own guide
(for your specific platform?) at your website, so that we have a
simple and reliable step-by-step guide which lowers the hurdles to
building trunk.

Cheers,
Janus