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

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Hi Federico!

On Wed, 2012-04-18 at 17:55 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> I've been having a terrible time trying to get something tested on top
> of Gnome 3.4, all because I can't get 3.4 built from jhbuild.  I'm too
> old to build from tarballs, and my distro doesn't carry 3.4 yet.
> 
> I wonder how people who hack on "core Gnome" do it on a day to day
> basis.
> 
> Here are the results of a little poll/brainstorm on Twitter:
> https://live.gnome.org/BuildMeHarder
> 
> As a quick summary, the problems we have with jhbuild are:
> 
> 1. "Build everything before you can contribute" is a *HUGE* brick wall
> for contributors both regular and sporadic.
> 
> 2. Jhbuild is unreliable for obscure reasons.  People don't have the
> time or skills to fix every little autotools problem that comes up -
> these seem to happen all the time ("what do you mean libtool macros not
> found!?  I already built 20 modules that use libtool!").  GISCAN fails
> regularly with unknown symbols.  Etcetera.
> 
> 3. Packages fail to build due to missing external dependencies, but you
> don't get notifid until the package fails to build.  It's not nice to
> get a failure in NetworkManager, after half a day of building, just
> because I didn't have the distro's ppp-devel package installed.  It
> would be nicer to get notified in advance.
> 
a solution for this would be to have a jhbuild package for your distro,
with all the dependencies, although that might be overkill, as it would
depend on lots of libraries, that maybe you don't need if you don't
build everything

> 4. You ask on IRC, and more often than not the best answer is, "wipe
> everything and try again".
> 
I never do this! I prefer to have an old module around than being unable
to build everything because a base module doesn't build :-)

cheers