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

["Andres G. Aragoneses" <knocte gmail com>]

On 21/07/15 11:16, drago01 wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 8:28 AM, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2015-07-21 at 03:11 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> > > Another problem I didn't mention which is that sometime the checkout
> > > dir makes "make" go bonkers at some point even with jhbuild build
> > > -fac. It is quite often that I update my jhbuild setup after ages of
> > > not touching it and I have to basically "rm -rf * && git reset -
> > > -hard" and configure again to get the build going again. Given how
> > > long it takes to jhbuild everything this is another extremely
> > > annoying point that we can't ensure won't hit people. You can't leave
> > > the thing building and go make a coffee, you have to work for the
> > > automation system instead of the other way around. It is really a
> > > disaster if you ask me that we enforce this on every GSoC student :/
> >
> > Perhaps the ideal solution would be to decouple the dependencies. When
> > I'm trying to fix up some mail protocol back end in Evolution, I really
> > *shouldn't* need to upgrade my entire system to the very latest
> > glib/gtk+ and then upgrade a whole bunch of *applications* which for
> > some reason don't work with the new libraries.
>
> Yeah that's the most annoying and time consuming part.
> I use jhbuild and it always has to build lots of stuff that I don't
> care about (ex. Webkit) ... it becomes even more annoying if something
> fails to build and I have to fix things just to get to what I want to
> work on.
> I try to avoid that by doing "buildone whatever" (where whatever is
> mutter or gnome-shell mostly).

Yep, buildone is of great help here, and from time to time there's 
always a blogpost in PlanetGnome about it. This is why I proposed some 
time ago to make the "buildone" behaviour be the default for the "build" 
actually:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711773

(To improve newcomers' experience and stop needing to blog about it...)