Firebrigade tests every gem ever made on every platform under the sun and
summarizes the results, enabling developers to see how their packages perform
on systems they don't have access to.
This is very good news; it's something many of us had been waiting
for*1. If you haven't yet (chances are you haven't since there are only 5 registered users and I'm the first to have submitted a build report), go see firebrigade, take a look at the reports for your software, and submit some.
firebrigade allows end-users to test
packages by running their tests in a Tinderbox (a sandboxed RubyGems
installation directory) and submit the results. So far, only one out of four
gems "builds" correctly...
As a developer, firebrigade allows you to see how well your software works on other platforms. For instance, thanks to firebrigade I know that rcodetools' tests need some work.
Tinderbox isn't yet able to test gems with multiple installation candidates,
so there are no build results for rcov, but I modified Tinderbox
locally to allow it to operate on an existent sandbox created
manually*2,
and found an error in the Rakefile that breaks the automated, sandboxed
testing.
Submitting build results
You can use tinderbox_gem_run to test packages automatically, but I wanted to give Firebrigade::API a try, and used it to submit a report for FastRI 0.3.0 under i686-linux/Ruby 1.8.5 2006-08-25:
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