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

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Mon, 2015-07-20 at 19:11 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
>  1) Hacking on system components that require hardware access (kernel 
> drivers, NetworkManager)
>  2) Hacking on system components that don't inherently require 
> hardware access (kernel filesystems, systemd, polkit, gdm)
>  3) Hacking on session level components (gnome-session, gnome-shell, 
> gnome-settings-daemon), and the libraries they use (gnome-desktop, 
> clutter)
>  4) Hacking on libraries (gtk+)
>  5) Hacking on applications
>
> Which ones of these do you do? How do you do it? Is 'jhbuild run' 
> sufficient for your needs? 

I do 4 and 5 with 'jhbuild build' et. al. and 'jhbuild run'.

> Do you log into a jhbuild session? as yourself? as a test user?

I used to do 3 on rare occasions, but stopped doing that because I no
longer remember how I ever managed to run a GNOME session under jhbuild
in the past. There used to be instructions on the wiki, but they got
deleted at some point because they became outdated. The problems I
wanted to fix were never so urgent as to convince me to impel me to
figure it out on my own. Pretty sure new contributors have no chance
here.

>  Do you replace system level components? With 'make install'? By 
> building packages? Do you use gnome-continuous?

I've replaced system level components with 'make install' when I found
no other way to test a search provider. That displeased me.