Re: How do you hack on the bleeding edge of Gnome?

[Michael Hill <mdhillca fastmail fm>]

Hi Federico,

On Wed, 2012-04-18 at 17:55 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> I wonder how people who hack on "core Gnome" do it on a day to day
> basis.

I showed up at a documentation hackfest just over a year ago with my
laptop. The bad news was my distro of the previous five years was Ubuntu
(with Debian before that); the good news was I had a freshly-burned
GNOME 3 Live disk. It didn't take me long to decide to overwrite Ubuntu
with openSUSE. Soon I got a new laptop and upgraded to GNOME Factory,
which has run (mostly) flawlessly for long stretches.

When I wanted to start looking at Boxes for documentation purposes,
jhbuild was relatively easy to get set up on openSUSE. After a few
weeks, 'jhbuild build gnome-boxes' succeeded and never stopped. Things
got big and complicated when Tracker was added as a dependency, but a
developer introduced me to the '--ignore-suggests' switch.

Shortly after that I added Mageia Cauldron to my hard drive because Olav
Vitters *packaged* Boxes for it. (This was fortuitous because at the
Brno hackfest, openSUSE wasn't allowing me into GNOME Shell.) I had
GNOME 3.4 running on Mageia when the tarballs were still warm (like all
of the 3.3.9x releases).

All has not been fun and games with jhbuild: the 3.4 upgrade on openSUSE
coincided with a 3.3.0 kernel update so devastating I couldn't boot into
a console (video and wireless firmware issues possibly). I wiped out
my /opt/gnome (and my jhbuild setup) re-installing a nightly build from
February, back to GNOME 3.2, and I'm reluctant to try upgrading again
until a similar video issue is fixed. jhbuild on 3.2 now has a missing
dependency I haven't had time to diagnose.

The recipe to install the GNOME development environment isn't as
straightforward on Mageia, so I've installed Fedora 17 on my desktop
machine. I haven't succeeded jhbuilding Boxes since 3.4 came out,
though; this week I can't get past a glib failure.

Meanwhile, I've moved my local git repositories to my Mageia partition,
and I'm watching on pkgsubmit.mageia.org as the 3.4.1 packages build.
All three of my new distros provide a bleeding edge GNOME experience, as
well as the ability to run Debian's GNOME 3.2 fallback mode in Boxes and
Fedora's accelerated video inside QEMU. I've never really missed my
former distro of choice.

Mike