Re: strawman (Was Re: build systems)
- From: David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>
- To: Adam Schreiber <sadam clemson edu>
- Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: strawman (Was Re: build systems)
- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:37:37 -0500
On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 23:05 -0500, Adam Schreiber wrote:
> On Nov 11, 2007 10:52 PM, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
> > It would be great to release a suite of GNOME apps for Windows (maybe even
> > OS X) along with our tarballs every six months -- to grow our audience and
> > potential developer pool -- with the least amount of work possible. :-)
>
> While I agree this would increase the audience, I wonder about the
> feasibility.
>
> * Do enough maintainers/developers still run windows systems and have
> Windows developement experience?
>
> * Would this require a new pool of developers to be aquired before
> such a release?
>
> * Would this introduce new bugs that would be difficult to track down
> and kill without access to a Windows development environment?
>
> * Would there be an active group, similar perhaps to gnome-love
> (windows-love?) that would patrol windows related bugs?
I actually regard Windows / OS X support as an (important) secondary
goal. The primary goal, I think, of this exercise would be to make it so
easy to start hacking on GNOME applications that any Windows / OS X
programmer can do it. E.g. the whole shrink-wrapped IDE experience.
For example, on Linux the Eclipse plug-in would use PackageKit to fetch
the appropriate -devel packages (e.g. on Fedora equivalent to 'yum
install /usr/lib/pkgconfig/hal.pc'). E.g. it would be something like
this. E.g. Joe Coder
- Starts Eclipse
- Selects "New project from SVN"
- Browse GNOME SVN; selects the Totem module
- Presses F11 to build and run the code
- Edits source code
- When happy with the feature: Generates and submits patch through
existing Eclipse UI to the GNOME Bugzilla
- Alternative: Commits the patch directly to GNOMESVN
- Then: Generates a .deb or .rpm he can put on his blog for people
to try his new feature.
- Optional: connects to the OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. build
systems to upload the changes
That's the user experience I'm after. The whole IDE thing.
> * There would probably have to be an easy and somewhat trusted method
> of installing binary packages for Windows. (Winbuntu?)
I think the Win32 implementation of the hypothetical program that does
builds will just produce a MSI installable package on Windows. Details,
but as they say, the devil is in the detail.
And, hey, there's this great movie with the quote: "If you build it,
they will come". Especially now with GTK+ becoming much more powerful
(e.g. growing a VFS and soon a DConf backend) a lot of our apps will,
pretty soon, just start working on Win32 and OS X.
The point really is that with a declarative, not imperative, build
specification language (e.g. without any of the UNIX cruft) it suddenly
becomes feasible to think about writing a native and feature-par Win32 /
OS X implementation of the build system that uses native constructs and
integrates with native components. Such as spitting out MSI installers
and what not.
David
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