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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2015-07-21 at 02:04 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> It'd be really nice if we could team up with the people working on 
> container technology so that we were able to run a full GNOME session 
> within a container. Even if it was privilleged.

I'm intimidated by the amount of work there. For each system service
that GNOME interacts with: systemd, logind, polkit, bluez, gdm,
NetworkManager, cupsd, and so forth, you have have to choose between
tunneling it through or having a version of the daemon running within
the container that somehow plays nice with the host system. systemd
-nspawn, which is used to test systemd goes with the "plays nice"
approach

Not impossible but Hard. It would be interesting if anybody has
experience with getting something along these lines working.

[...]

> 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.

I agree that the jhbuild process is a waste but gnome-continuous as it
exists currently doesn't provide an alternative. There's no provision
for downloading remote build artifacts, and then building just some
modules locally. And some of the things that were done to make gnome
-continuous robust - like assembling a build root from scratch for each
build and building each module from scratch - make it much slower and
more resource intensive for local hacking than jhbuild.

- Owen