I have been sitting on this for at least a month. As brainstormed in this post, I have developed a system on a spare, headless, always-on x86 Linux box that automatically updates its FFmpeg SVN copy and compiles it with 6 different gcc versions, essentially the latest in each of the 2.95, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.0, and 4.1 series. That’s all working quite well. The part that I’m trying to resolve right now is what to do with the results. I would like to aggregate the results into a concise format for easy web reading. Plus, it would be good to have a history of build successes/failures. I think an RSS aggregation would be useful as well. And for bonus points, some halfway intelligent system that figures out which warnings occur in all or most builds. This would reveal good code janitor work for aspiring FFmpeg developers.
This is just the first phase. Of course, I want to add functional tests later, such as the standard regression. I am still trying to get the infrastructure up.
Related post:
What would be really useful is to do automated regression tests on the samples archive. The standard regression tests only cover things that ffmpeg can encode, and thus misses breakage in decoders for things like game formats, realaudio, svq3, and so on.