Winners of today's build breakages

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

Due to some concerted effort from lots of awesome volunteers (Brent
Smith, Frederic Peters, Luca Ferretti, Joseph Sacco, and I'm sure lots
of others I'm missing) trying to make building Gnome "Just Work" (from
both tarballs and cvs), it took less than a dozen patches and fixes to
*almost* get a preliminary testing version of Gnome 2.15.90[1] to
build today.  ;-)  So, without further adieu, the winners of today's
build breakages are:

deskbar-applet:
(1) deskbar-applet added a new external dependency (elementtree)
without notice being given to d-d-l.  In general we've sucked at
letting maintainers know that they need to announce new external
dependencies (and that the community needs to agree upon them, though
there's an assumed acceptance unless someone voices objection), so we
probably can't go too hard on them.  The dependency is probably sane,
considering that it looks like it'll be part of python-2.5 anyway.
But it, like dependencies added in other modules, should have at least
been announced.  :)

(2) deskbar-applet doesn't build against recent versions of
evolution-data-server.  Frederic provided a patch on bugzilla that
works, though[2].  We need a new release with this or an alternative
fix.

ekiga:
ekiga cannot be built because one of its dependencies, opal, refuses
to build from tarballs.  See below.

totem:
No new release of totem was made, meaning that the fix in head for
using dbus_connection_disconnect() isn't in the most recent tarball.
So, we just need a new tarball release.

Modules that aren't part of gnome, but which we depend on:

(dbus-glib already covered by John on list and in his blog, so I'll skip it)

opal:
opal will not build unless one of a small, though common, list of
conditions is met (building pwlib from cvs instead of tarballs, or
pwlib is installed in $HOME/pwlib, or pwlib is installed under /usr or
/usr/local; no other installation prefix is handled)[3].

libxklavier:
Longstanding issue of always using -Werror even in tarball releases
when it doesn't compile without warnings.

hal:
Just like totem, no recent release has been made so it does not build
against recent versions of dbus.  The fix is in head, we just need a
new release.  Well, maybe...hal head has all kinds of other nasty
issues (libvolume_id and PolicyKit related in some cases).  This is
almost a no-win situation.  Would the community accept us not allowing
modules to depend on e.g. dbus and hal cvs starting in gnome 2.17?
It'd really be a lot nicer to just depend on the distributor versions
of these modules for many reasons.


Thanks everyone,
Elijah


[1] Available at http://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/2.15.90/ for
those that want to give it a spin.

[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347988

[3] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1528750&group_id=80674&atid=560612