Every day, Sourcehut runs continuous integration for FreeBSD and OpenBSD for dozens of projects, and believe it or not, some of them don’t even use Sourcehut for distribution! Improving the BSD software ecosystem is important to us, and as such our platform is designed to embrace the environment around it, rather than building a new walled garden. This makes it easy for existing software projects to plug into our CI infastructure, and many BSD projects take advantage of this to improve their software.

Some of this software is foundational stuff, and their improvements trickle down to the entire BSD ecosystem. Let’s highlight a few great projects that take advantage of our BSD offerings.

Programming languages: Janet, Nim, Zig

Several programming languages use Sourcehut to run BSD testing. The Janet language uses Sourcehut to test both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and fast - each build takes only about a minute! The newest language to join us is Nim, which now uses builds.sr.ht to make sure every Github pull request works correctly on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The Zig project, long time friends of Sourcehut, have also been using builds.sr.ht to test their FreeBSD support, and they host their mailing lists with us, too.

The stability of programming languages is especially important, as bugs in the compiler or implementation will affect all software compiled with it. Thanks for using Sourcehut to keep your BSD support in good shape, guys!

End-user software: Neovim, mutt

End-user software gets in on the fun, too, which puts more stable BSD software closer to your fingertips. The Neovim project, a fast moving and modern fork of the venerable Vim text editor, uses builds.sr.ht for OpenBSD testing, and working on using it to help fix bugs in their FreeBSD port. The similarly venerable mutt email client has also been experimenting with Sourcehut recently. They’re using builds.sr.ht to make sure mutt compiles on FreeBSD, Alpine Linux, and Debian, and they’re trying out lists.sr.ht mailing lists, too.

Display servers: wlroots, sway

One of my own projects, wlroots, was one of the first adopters of Sourcehut, to no surprise. We were also early adopters of FreeBSD support, and now we use it to test that dozens of Wayland compositors work well on the platform. Several of these test themselves further down the stack on FreeBSD as well, such as my own sway project, and the cage project, and more projects still are using Sourcehut to test other operating systems as well.

Small projects, too!

Lots of smaller projects have been taking advantage of Sourcehut’s BSD tools, too, to make sure they’re set up right on for our Berkley friends from the start. Simon Ser’s mrsh shell tests on FreeBSD, Arch Linux, and Alpine Linux. Michael Forney’s samurai project uses Sourcehut builds to test four operating systems, including Free and OpenBSD!

And yours?

Want to try it yourself? Just set your build manifest’s image to freebsd/latest or openbsd/latest and drop it into the submit page to give it a test drive - no need to push any half-baked test commits until it’s done. Check out the compatibility page for details on builds.sr.ht support for *BSD and other operating systems, and check out dispatch.sr.ht to add BSD CI to your Github projects.

Hey! Are you a NetBSD expert? We need some help to finish up NetBSD support on builds.sr.ht. Get in touch?