Re: jhbuild update required

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:23 AM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com> wrote:
> On 5 September 2012 15:13, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:
>> jhbuild is not meant to be packaged. I'd highly suggest you stop
>> packaging jhbuild.
>
> Yes, you're not the only one to say that. But, I thought a big part of
> what jhbuild offers is that it makes it relatively easy to try out the
> bleeding edge of GNOME without having to mess with learning how to
> ./configure, make, make install (and of course ./configure doesn't
> work on GNOME packages without running autogen.sh first but how's a
> beginner to know that?). Requiring a beginner to manually build
> jhbuild from source defeats that advantage.

I think initiatives along the lines of build servers generating live CDs
or usb mountable images are more what you're looking for.

Whether you get past actually installing jhbuild on your system
or not, by the package manager or via a git clone, there's no way
you will be able to build highlevel modules on the bleeding edge
without a little know-how.

In other words, the build will fail and you will have to fix it, either by
upgrading python, installing some unspoken dependency or by
actually meddling in source code during the build and forcing it
to build.

This is not the case for *some* jhbuild setups, for instance stable
release module sets typically have less problems and the jhbuild
scripts targeting quartz builds (on OSX) are typically error free.

But that's only because those build scripts target very specific
module versions for each checkout (or resort to downloading
release tarballs directly)... if you build master, you will have
problems and you should know how to fix them.

You cannot blame jhbuild scripts for this issue, the quality of
the jhbuild scripts will not avoid the simple fact that there will
always be some disconnection between modules in master
between release cycles, those are bugs in the effected
modules and are generally fixed during the unstable dev
cycle (for instance, you cant expect gedit developers to
update all of their dependencies between every single commit
that they make, although I'm sure they are pretty good at
updating things frequently enough).

This does not mean jhbuild is not useful, by far.

For some perspective, how I used to build gnome modules
before jhbuild existed was an exercise consisting of listing
by hand all of my inter-module dependencies and
updating/building them by hand in the right order.

Like many others I would use a custom environment script which
consisted mostly of:

PATH=/opt/devel/bin:$(PATH)
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/devel/lib
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/devel/lib/pkgconfig
ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /opt/devel/share/aclocal"
(and I probably forgot something else here...)

This manual building is a real problem that jhbuild does solve.

Cheers,
            -Tristan

>
> Also, there's the whole problem of users needing to periodically
> update their jhbuild manually. Why not let distros handle that like
> they do every other package?
>
> I've always ran jhbuild from the distro package. As long as jhbuild
> gets regular releases, those releases get packaged, and I use the
> default network modulesets, I don't see a problem.
>
> Jeremy
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