Using GNOME Continous images

[Daniel Svensson <dsvensson gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm developing some GTK applications and I usually try to stay ahead of the curve wrt new features. Traditionally I've been using jhbuild to get newer library versions than Debian Sid has to offer, but I've recently read up a bit on OSTree thanks to Alex's blog post on sandboxed applications and then from there I read about the build.g.o images. I've done some basic experimentation but I'm kind of stuck, so question time:

What images to use?

Here are two fairly recent directories both named "current":

https://build.gnome.org/work/images/current/

http://build.gnome.org/continuous/buildmaster/images/z/current/

One has z in its directory and is compressed, but is also 20 days older than the former, and both images are from january when we're now in late febuary, which takes us to the next question..

What conditions must be met for a new qcow2 image to be created?

Is it correct that the latest of these ones, 27:th jan, is the one to use, and then execute "ostree admin upgrade" once it has booted, rather than new images being produced every commit or day or something?

When starting in qemu I didn't really know what to expect. Turns out it leaves me without a graphical environment, and without a login-prompt. To try to figure out what's going on I had to mount the qcow2 image and edit the boot parameters to include console=.. which together with "-serial stdio" to qemu gives you a loginprompt in the terminal that launches qemu.

By now I was able to login, and see that wayland seems to be started, and after some googling I found that to get gdm up I needed to start qemu with "-vga std" instead of relying on the default.

Now gdm started, and I was greeted by a list of no users, after adding a user via the serial access and restarting gdm I could now finally login, except that nothing happens, just the grey gdm background all over the screen, for what seems likely to be, forever... so that leaves me stuck.

So what's the suggested way of doing all of this? It feels like I'm bruteforcing something that ought to have a clear path.

Is using the GNOME Continous images a good way to have access to the latest GNOME build environment, or is it meant to be used only for the automated testing the C-I infrastructure applies?

Is the kernel kdbus-patched?

Another question that popped up is if this is possible to run all of this via systemd-nspawn, as a more lightweight solution. I found some hacky suggestions about changing the host kernel parameters, but I'm hoping those suggestions are somewhat dated by now.

--

Daniel Svensson