Re: non-Linux OSes

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On mån, 2013-10-21 at 10:34 -0400, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> hi,
>
> GLib aims to work on a wide range of operating systems, but we have no
> good story for ensuring that this is the case.  Mostly we do things for
> Linux and, if they are the sort of thing that may cause problems, we
> also check that they work on Windows.  We read manpages and make sure
> that the functions we are using are in the proper POSIX specs, but this
> is not always a fool-proof process.
>
> We want to improve this situation.
>
> Dan recently started by doing some patches to pull out ancient support
> for OSes like OS/2 and BeOS.
>
> We have brainstormed a list of platforms that we think that we want to
> support and it looks like so:  Linux, {Free,Net,Open}BSD,
> (Open?)Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Hurd, Darwin, mingw(32/64), MSVC.

By Darwin you mean OSX in general I assume?

I think this is a good idea, as it allows us to clean some things up,
and to know which features (like constructor support) that we can rely
on, etc.

I think the above list is a good start. But it is not good enough. We
also need to specify which versions of the above OSes, and which
versions of the compilers (especially important for e.g. msvc).

What about android? It runs "linux", but its sufficiently different than
desktop linux to require its own testing.

Also, what about iOS? As per e.g.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5287960/compiling-glib-for-iphone:

        Yes it can be built, (see:
        http://stackoverflow.com/a/17733328/1856278) and there are
        several Apps in the Appstore that uses it.

> There is also the question of non-standard compilers (icc?).

llvm?

> What we don't have are the resources to setup routine testing of GLib
> against these target operating systems.  Some of these operating systems
> are not Free Software.

It seems to me that it should be possible to have virtual instances of
at least Linux (of various kinds), *Bsd, OpenSolaris, and Hurd running
in some VM farm setup with "just" some work. But ideally we should be
running copies of the non-free OSes too. 

Which these are virtualizable on x86? I know OSX is virtualizable, but
there are licensing issues on non-apple hardware. Solaris is availible
on X86, maybe we can ask oracle for a few licenses for this (of course,
ideally we should be testing on sparc hw too). HP-UX is itanium and
pa-risc only i believe, AIX is PPC/s390 only. Maybe we could score a
power machine that can run VMs from somewhere, but s390/pa-risc/itanium
hardware sounds unlikely, maybe we can soft-emulate them?.