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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Going for a test drive
Feed Title: Testing 1,2,3...
Feed URL: http://djberg96.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: A blog on Ruby and other stuff.
I have several packages where the source code can vary wildly from platform to platform, so I try to cover as many as I can. For the most part this means I'm limited to Solaris, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. I'm guessing most folks are limited to just one or two platforms.
What's a cross-platform developer to do? One of the things you can do is sign up for the HP test drive program. You can go to http://www.testdrive.hp.com and take a look at all of the supported platforms. The short version is various flavors of Linux, BSD, Tru64, HP-UX and OpenVMS. It's free.
Also note that SourceForge has a compile farm with various flavors of Linux, OS X, and Solaris, though I've never used it.
Unfortunately, Ruby is not installed on all of the HP test drive machines (though it is on a few), but all of them seem to have some version of gcc, which is good. But, there's more bad news - I can't get Ruby to build on any of the HP-UX machines, nor can I get it to build on the Tru64 boxes. In some cases it appears to be configure issues, but on Tru64 it looks like one of those gcc warnings that Matz happily ignores actually caused an error. I could be wrong, but it looks damned suspicious.