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

[Paolo Borelli <paolo borelli gmail com>]

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.

I use jhbuild and to be honest I cannot remember last time I had a
blocking problem with it... in fact I just run a build from scratch last
week and it did not stop once. Worse problem I can remember in the last
couple of years or so is that the URL for one of the external dep
tarball was currently offline.

I think the trick is to have a well trusted jhbuildrc[1] which skips
stuff like dbus or NetworkManager and to make sure to have all the
required development tools and low level libraries installed from your
distro. For instance this[2] is the collection of packages I install.

I admit however I do not usually build some of the "difficult" modules
like gdm etc.

That said, I cannot recall how many times I helped people on irc to get
started with jhbuild and I really look forward to a better tool that
lowers the barrier of entry to get started hacking on gnome. walters'
ostree definitely looks promising. 


> (Side thoughts:  how many people have *actually* tested a full 3.4
> install?)
> 

This is a very valid concern that has been bugging me for a long time: a
few years ago I used to run a full jhbuild session as my day to day
environment and I was not alone doing it, but when distros started to
pick up the 6 months cadence, it simply became easier to run a
development distro. That however has many effects: first of all I
upgrade to the beta version of my distro usually late in the cycle.
Beside, when running binary packages, if I stumble in a small bug in a
random module, sometimes I do not have the energy to go checkout the
sources, reproduce, debug etc etc.
Relying on downstream distribution for testing also has the problem that
when ubuntu decides to skip a cycle our QA level drops noticeably.

Once again it looks like our best bet is to wait for walters to give the
green light on ostree.


Paolo


1: http://people.gnome.org/~pborelli/jhbuildrc
2: http://people.gnome.org/~pborelli/postinstall.sh.txt


>   Federico
> 
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