SDF Public Access Unix System

Re:SDF Public Access Unix System by hanslub42 on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @05:10AM (#31081032)

This may be the appropriate place to gratefully mention Polarhome (http://www.polarhome.com/), that for many years managed a "dinosaur zoo" of ageing Unix systems, on which one could buy a login for a nominal fee. Very convenient for me as developer of a portable Unix utility (rlwrap) - it allowed me to spot many portability problems (often real bugs that manifested themselves only on certain systems).

Sadly, Polarhome has thrown in the towel. Does anyone know of something comparable, i.e. not only a public access Unix system, but one that offers a range of Unices?

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Re:SDF Public Access Unix System by prmoustache on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @07:08AM (#31081622)

I guess if you have a recurring need for it you might be able to contact them to have access to some system on demands or a scheduled windows. In the last news it says the following:

"The system will be up from time to time to help open source development - but it is closed to the public."

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Re:SDF Public Access Unix System by acuozzo on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @01:21PM (#31086041)

Are you interested in teaming up to build one?

I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.

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Re:SDF Public Access Unix System by hanslub42 on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @04:41AM (#31094256)

I'm really horrible at hardware, so...

> I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.

I doubt whether a "OS zoo" would be of great help for this - many old OSes can run a modern gcc; it is the system calls and terminal/pty/streams behaviours that can be very different (QNX is a great example of this)

Moreover (cf. the great musl preprocessor debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067059) - for me as a "portable programmer" this kind of macro is rather less useful (though sometimes useful as a quick fix) than testing for individual features, as that will make the program compile and work on future, or unknown ancient architectures/compilers (at least in theory....)

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Re:SDF Public Access Unix System by baruchel on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @07:19AM (#31081694)

You are the developer if rlwrap? Thank you for that!

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