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I wonder if someone else thinks alike. Often I find myself committing things wondering whether a particular snippet doesn't break the *BSD or gentoo build. Now wouldn't it be handy to fire up a virtual machine (with all the devel tools), test the snippet and go back to your usual work flow?

Just this weekend I was on the prowl for a FreeBSD image with texinfo (esp. texi2dvi) installed, I ended up installing my own copy and compiling devel tools for the next 3 hours. Whereas all I wanted is to quickly download a ready 500M qemu image, fire it up, test my stuff and throw it away again.

Question now: Is there something like http://virtualboximages.com/ or http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ specifically tailored to the needs of developers? Or more precisely, the task is to list all such places, because having to search for stuff for hours is just as bad as installing stuff for hours.

hroptatyr
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  • Off topic, programmers.stackexchange would probably be a better place to ask. – vzwick Oct 17 '11 at 11:07
  • ok, might be, how can I move the question there? – hroptatyr Oct 17 '11 at 11:10
  • I don't think you can, I voted "off topic" though, so a mod might/will eventually trigger the migration. If you can, you should do the same, this will speed things up. – vzwick Oct 17 '11 at 11:11
  • This question unmigrated: programming tools are [on-topic on Stack Overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/faq), not Programmers. –  Oct 22 '11 at 04:06
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    @vzwick: this *really* should be on-topic here. There are tons of questions on pretty much the same topic. Whether there's an *answer* I cannot say, but the topic is pretty clearly dev/testing-tools... – Shog9 Oct 22 '11 at 04:06

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What about the openSUSE build service (OBS): http://en.opensuse.org//openSUSE:Build_Service

It supports scriptable automated builds within kvm or xen machines. Just sign up for a free account and configure some "packages" (builds and tests) remote via osc command line client or webinterface. It also supports local builds within chroot.

They have all the major Linux distros available ready to use.

To have more exotic systems/archs you would need to install such OBS server by yourself at home. Having it at home would make you even able to log in your build machines to debug interactively.

cu, Rudi

rudimeier
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  • Accepting this answer because it looks like the best shot. It's probably too costly (in terms of bandwidth) to operate a service as suggested originally, plus given the sheer number of possible combinations it's maybe wise not to start one. – hroptatyr Jan 31 '12 at 14:18