Re: System services & jhbuild

[Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>]

Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 9:55 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
> <zeeshanak gnome org> wrote:
> > Unless someone has plans on fixing this (somehow) soon, I would
> > suggest we either kick out all system services from jhbuild all
> > together or at least remove them from dependency list of other
> > modules.
> +1 for me,  It should try to use what is already on the system.

It does (basically it sets PKG_CONFIG_PATH to also look into the
system directories, so if you have networkmanager development files
installed, it will find them), and it even automatically skip modules
that are installed with a proper version (but it has to know the
required minimum version, and we used to maintain that appropriately
with "external deps", less so thosedays).

Also, while it's not possible to run system services, it may still be
useful to have them in jhbuild, as they provide libraries that will be
used by other modules. For example it is required to have
accountsservice libraries to build and run gnome-control-center, but
most panels will be fine if the service itself is not running.


> Besides, what is the end goal of jhbuild?  Is it to write code against
> the latest GNOME or is it to build a complete desktop environment?  I
> would argue that we already have gnome-continuous for the latter.
> Reducing jhbuild's scope would help make it an easier tool to manage
> and actually work.

It would certainly be easier but I don't foresee the double goal of
jhbuild changing much, because it still has to fulfil both in some
ways (as it's made to run in a VM, I don't feel like gnome-continuous
provides an appropriate testing/working environment).

Still, we may envision changes; for example it's now possible to have
conditional modules, so perhaps we could work to have it both ways,
with a default set without the system services, and a flag to enable
them, a la "jhbuild --conditions=+system-services build".



        Fred