A virtual machine for testers?

[Damian Rouson]

Hi Jerry,

Presumably you're referring to regular builds of the trunk.  I already have access to regularly updated trunk builds via Macports.  My email was a response to Janus’s comment about the lack of testing of a patch that had not yet been applied to the trunk.

For what it’s worth, I’m equally happy to use OS X (10.9.1.) or Linux (Ubuntu 12.04.2). I install most things in OS X via macports and in Ubuntu via apt-get.  I’m going to get going soon (maybe this weekend) on building from source myself, but I just wanted to the developers to be aware of an important reason that most users don’t test patches before they hit the trunk.  I’ll take copious notes about the experience this time and share the results if I believe they’re useful.  

Damian

_________________________________________________________
Damian Rouson, Ph.D., P.E.
Managing Director and Lecturer
Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Sciences
Stanford University
http://cees.stanford.edu
http://rouson.youcanbook.me 
650-497-3247 (office)
510-600-2992 (mobile)








On Mar 7, 2014, at 10:35 AM, Jerry DeLisle <jvdelisle@charter.net> wrote:

> On 03/05/2014 02:44 PM, Damian Rouson wrote:
>> 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.
>> 
> 
> A few years ago, a few of us here were doing regular builds and they were posted
> to places people could get them.  I was doing daily linux-i686 builds until that
> machine had a hardware failure.  I was also doing mingw, which is now being done
> by the mingw team.
> 
> So, what platforms are you thinking about? All or a particular one needed.
> 
> Jerry