Re: [Gimp-developer] Contribute to OSX-specific features and bug fixes

[Carmelo DrRaw <aferrero1975 gmail com>]

Hi!

> On 28 Mar 2018, at 14:58, Kristian Rietveld <kris loopnest org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 7:51 AM, Carmelo DrRaw <aferrero1975 gmail com> wrote:
> > There are actually two major things I can offer:
> > * try to fix OSX-specific bugs - I can compile GIMP from sources, and I know how to run a debugger…
>
> Solving bugs is always welcome! And also help with reproducing bugs.
> Regularly Mac-specific bugs are filed without clear reproduction
> instructions. Without knowing how to reproduce bugs it is hard to fix
> them ...
>
>
> > * help you to set-up an automated packaging of OSX bundles using Travis-CI, in case you are interested. I 
> > have already set-up such mechanism for my own image editing project (PhotoFlow), and it seems to work like 
> > a charm. Dependencies are provided via homebrew. The advantage is that the packaging does not rely on any 
> > specific user, and runs on virtualised systems which increases the security for the final users.
>
> The GIMP DMG package cannot depend on dependencies via homebrew. The
> DMG image must be self contained. In the last year I have been working
> on a magic Python script that builds GIMP and all its dependencies
> from scratch (using jhbuild). Subsequently it validates the build
> products and then it packages them as App bundle in a DMG image. This
> script produces exactly the same DMG images as we have been releasing
> in the last few years. It works fine for 2.8 now and I was in the
> process of preparing all necessary commits to upstream it before I had
> to attend to some matters in real life. I plan to finish this work
> soon and then continue with the adaptations necessary to build 2.10
> releases.

I am using homebrew to install the dependencies, honestly I find it more practical than jhbuild.
When creating the bundle, the libraries installed via homebrew are included so that the bundle is 
self-consistent.

> Now that you mention Travis-CI, I was wondering if you have access to
> a macOS build server? One limitation is that I currently have to use
> my old Mac laptop to produce these builds. Having access to a build
> server would greatly simplify this process. Also, with the script that
> has been written it should not be hard to simply run it nightly or
> weekly to produce regular builds.

Travis provides MacOS build servers. The only issue is that the jobs are limited to 40 minutes, which are 
obviously not enough to install all dependencies.
The solution I found is to do an incremental install of the homebrew packages via Travis itself, and save the 
resulting homebrew tree as a tar package that is stored back on github.
For the final build, I simply fetch and extract the pre-packaged tar file, which provides me all the required 
dependencies.

It takes some hours to set-up, but then it just works…

Regards.

> regards,
>
> -kris.