Re: How do you hack on GNOME? How can we do better?

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Tue, 2015-07-21 at 02:04 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Relying on jhbuild from my point of view is a waste of everybody's 
> time, we've got all these developers building the same version of the > same module in the same 
> architecture again and again and again, to > reach more or less the same state, all the people who give up 
> on > writing a patch or testing master everytime a module breaks (like the > latest libgit2-glib issues for 
> example) is a precious resource we're > wasting for not having the right infrastructure. Up to the point of 
> > glib or gtk+ is kinda handy but beyond that is almost impractical.

The problem is that we have no way to make sure our modules are always
in a buildable state. It's not impractical and it wouldn't even be
particularly difficult, the result would look awfully like GNOME
Continuous, building each jhbuild module in containers a few important
distros; it's just a challenge nobody has had time to attempt yet. I
was hoping GNOME Continuous would help with this, but the problem is
that Continuous is completely separate from jhbuild so they can have
different build issues; when an issue is detected in Continuous, it
isn't fixed in jhbuild; and Continuous isn't a jhbuild replacement. I
think our need is Continuous for jhbuild.

In the meantime, all it takes to avoid the libgit2-glib situation is
for someone to take a few minutes to roll back the module to an older
version [1][2][3]. My bad for not doing this immediately when I noticed
the problem; I wanted to give the developers some time to fix the
issue, but in hindsight that was wrong; these issues must be addressed
immediately since they block contributors from working on GNOME.

The other issue with jhbuild right now is a circular dependency problem
between, erm, g-i, vala, and... something else, I forget, which causes
everything to fail for new users but work fine for existing users. This
sucks. To avoid this, we need a dependency that says "build this module
eventually after building me" or "build me eventually after building
this other module," which we don't currently have. (I thought it was
"after" but that's something else.)

[1] https://git.gnome.org/browse/jhbuild/commit/?id=baa893595c98900e069
8dab2286953e0a5d723db
[2] https://git.gnome.org/browse/jhbuild/commit/?id=661878b5ca0a1a97fed
1f5f61ecaa5991bf870d5
[3] https://git.gnome.org/browse/jhbuild/commit/?id=b651a03d8f1f7b7e2c3
ccd56de25ea42c2b2b9f6