Re: Common knowledge in jhbuild for funny modules

["Jonathon Jongsma" <jonathon jongsma gmail com>]

On 8/9/06, Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 20:59 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
>
> [CCing Josselin; please read the last quoted paragraph :) ]
>
> > On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 18:55 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > > /me starts cheerleading federico on
> > >
> > > I don't know the answers, but the building-gnome nightmare is long
> > > overdue for discussion.
> > ...
> > > Magnus Therning spent a similar amount of time recently, with the gory
> > > details archives on the gnome-love list.  I totally agree with you.
> > >
> > > Most of the build issues are due to the fact that we allow
> > > dependencies on cvs versions of freedesktop.org modules.  I'd like to
> > > propose that we move away from that, and just pick certain tarball
> > > versions to depend on at the beginning of a release; and require
> > > specific proposals to allow dependencies on newer tarball versions if
> > > issues come up.  Thoughts?  Comments?
> >
> > I would be very interesting in hearing the opinions of people like
> > Josselin Mouette <joss debian org> who build new releases of GNOME for
> > their respective distributions regularly. How do they keep up? What
> > tricks are they using? Can we steal some of their ideas?
>
> Doesn't Debian always build from tarballs?  Or are they pulling CVS
> snapshots?
>
> I imagine that tarballs aren't that big of a problem, since they have
> been at least 'make distcheck'ed and if you are building a .deb or .rpm,
> you *do* want to install to system paths.

But if I remember correctly, Magnus Therning's struggles (mentioned
above and documented on the gnome-love mailing list) were actually
trying to build a tarball set (2.15.90 I believe) and he gave up in
frustration after several weeks.  So while building from CVS is always
going to be a lot more difficult, even building from tarballs seems to
be too difficult for mere mortals.  And making the tarball releases
easy to build by a normal developer would help immensely in getting
more smoke-testing and polish for the GNOME releases.

--
jonner