Portability testing using pre-configured VMs

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

To ease portability testing of GNU software,
I've created a collection of virtual-machines of POSIX-compatible, 
Free-Software operating systems.
These are pre-configured with programs required for building autotools-based 
projects.

If anyone is interested in using them, downloads and more information are 
available here:
   http://www.nongnu.org/pretest/

I've sent few reports based on these VMs to various mailing lists
(and except the MINIX case, I hope the signal-to-noise ratio was good enough to 
be considered useful).

OSes include:
  gNewSense, Trisquel,
  Debian, Ubuntu (only the free repositories),
  CentOS, OpenSUSE,
  FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD,
  GNU Hurd, DilOS (OpenSolaris-like), MINIX.
Downloads here:
   http://www.nongnu.org/pretest/downloads/

In this first version, testing is done manually.
In future versions, I hope to automate large parts of it (that is - given a tarball, run 
"configure + make + make check" on all VMs). Integration with other 
infrastructures (like libvirt) is also a goal.

I will try to test future tarballs sent to platform-testers.

Comments and suggestions are welcomed,
(Please reply to  address@hidden )

 - Assaf