Re: make distcheck in tinderbox [was Re: make check failures- gnome-vfs, e-d-s, at-spi]

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 7/19/05, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 10:37 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 16:06 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > > On 7/18/05, Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org> wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 15:54 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > > > > What's so difficult about jhbuild?  Couldn't we make just make it easier
> > > > > (such as having jhbuild autodetect stuff in /usr and adjust
> > > > > PKG_CONFIG_PATH)?
> > > >
> > > > Processing power. Time.
> > >
> > > Also...
> >
> > Could we just package up the results of the jhbuild in a dumb,
> > completely mechanical way, such that installing the packages would be
> > exactly equivalent to running jhbuild? ie, it wouldn't replace or
> > conflict with your existing GNOME packages, it would just install
> > everything into its own special prefix. And we could have a single
> > less-dumb package that tweaked your vendor gdm configuration to add a
> > "jhbuild gnome" session.
> 
> This sounds like a pretty good idea.
> Of course, there will likely be few, very large packages.

Would likely have one per 'meta' jhbuild package in the build, so
yeah, they'd be large, but fine- bt them if that's an issue.

> I dunno if
> that matters much though. Even if they were finegrained you really need
> to update to the whole release to get good testing.

Yup.

> The naming of the packages could also be such that there is no chance of
> conflicting with your vendor gnome, current version or later installed.

I think Dan was suggesting (and certainly it is easier to produce)
something that isn't a package at all, just a tarball of binaries and
magic files, built into /opt/.

[Note that if done well, I don't actually think distributing packages
that conflict with your vendor GNOME is a problem, given proper
warning labels all over the place.]

> If we managed to create debuginfo packages we could get nice stack
> traces in reports from these builds too.

<shrug> If we're going to throw massive tarballs over the wall, might
as well add the extra few megs and just make them debug from the
start, no?

Luis (noting that he has no idea if this would actually *work*)