Re: System services & jhbuild

[Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>]

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:

> > 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).
>
> 1. Many users won't have the development packages installed for these
> system services and thus this won't be any solution for them. What sri
> meant (correct me if I'm wrong) is to simply leave system services to
> system.

jhbuild sysdeps checks for the presence of the pkg-config file, and
will then ask packagekit to install the proper packages.

And well, if an application needs the NetworkManager development
files, and they are not installed on the system, and that's certainly
less ideal than building correctly, because it had been built
correctly by jhbuild five steps before.


> 2. Not all services provide a library (e.g geoclue currently doesn't)
> so deps are setup for runtime-only. In that case, build of such
> services is almost always redundant.

You were talking about "kicking out all system services from jhbuild";
and many of those services provide libraries.  And geoclue provides a
.pc file and modules are checking for it at configure time (from a
quick grep: empathy, gnome-clocks, gnome-initial-setup, gnome-settings-
daemon).


> > 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.
>
> If control-center would need latest of accountsservice, its likely
> going to be because of new D-Bus API rather than just some convenience
> API provided by the library, wouldn't it? If control-center (built in
> jhbuild) can use the service from system at runtime, it can also use
> the library from system?

Nope, as Jasper wrote about the case of NetworkManager.


> > 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".
>
> Although I can totally agree with going for this approach, I still
> wonder what would user really achieve with this? Why build things that
> in the end will be useless?

As written before, they are not considered useless; heck, I even
consider building geoclue2 to get its single .pc file installed
useful.


        Fred