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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2015-07-21 at 03:00 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Are there specific reasons why KVM doesn't cut it for shell 
> developers? GPU access?

As mentioned in the original mail, there are two main issues:

 A) Indirection from the hardware: network, sound, monitors,
    webcams, bluetooth, touchscreens, GPU, etc. A lot of work on
    the core of GNOME is hardware integration work. I don't think
    we can advertise running in a VM as *the* way to develop
    the next version of GNOME.

 B) We simply don't have a good hacking environment for full
    operating system tree development. gnome-continuous is not
    really set up for making local changes and is also significantly
    harder to understand than jhbuild.

Right now, the best path for hacking gnome in a VM is running jhbuild
inside the VM, with quite a bit of a speed and convenience penalty.

- Owen