[webkit-dev] The tree is on fire: a tragedy of the commons

[Alex Milowski]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:24 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.com> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> The only EWS which requires committer access is Mac-EWS.  All other
>>>>>>> EWS bots will run any patch.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Why is that?   That's the platform I'm most interested in see run.
>>>>>
>>>>> Various reasons.  Mostly due to our current hardware setup.  If
>>>>> someone has some mac hardware they'd like to donate to the cause it
>>>>> would be most welcome.
>>>>
>>>> That seems really, really solvable.
>>>
>>> The core issue here is that the license for Mac OS X prevents us from
>>> running the OS in a virtual machine.  The way we protect ourselves
>>> from random folks haxoring the EWS on Linux is by running them on EC2
>>> and re-imagining the machines periodically.
>>
>> So, it is possible to run Mac OS X on a virtual machine:
>
> Oh, awesome!
>
>> The real issue is you can't run this in the cloud like on an EC2 server
>> because of the hardware restriction in Apple's license, right?
>
> EC2 has support for Linux and Windows, but not Mac.  I have been
> meaning to set up a Windows box, but I haven't gotten around to it
> yet.  If you know of a cloud provider that has Mac, we can set up the
> mac-ews there.

The only non-dedicated server hosting provider I've found is GoDaddy:

   http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/mac-hosting.aspx

I don't know if starting/stopping instances is as easy as Amazon's EC2
service (which I use).  I've never used their virtual hosting service.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics