[hanslub42]

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?

[prmoustache]

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."

[acuozzo]

Are you interested in teaming up to build one?

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

[hanslub42]

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....)

[baruchel]

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