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



On 21/07/15 01:11, Owen Taylor wrote:
As we move to Wayland, some of the ways we used to work on the core parts of GNOME (like gnome-shell 
--replace) no longer work. I think this is a good time to look at how we hack on GNOME, how we can make it 
more standard and obvious for newcomers, and how we can make it easier.

We can classify hacking on "GNOME" (taken very widely) into the following:

For my personal case:


 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)

I would add here at-spi2-core too. Although I don't regularly work on
at-spi2-core, usually is enough jhbuild to get it compiling. The tricky
part is get your jhbuild version running instead of the system one. I
usually handle this manually on my own system, without a jhbuild run.

 3) Hacking on session level components (gnome-session, gnome-shell, gnome-settings-daemon), and the 
libraries they use (gnome-desktop, clutter)

Hacking on gnome-shell has been increasingly frustrating, at least to
me. In my personal case is because it got more difficult to use at the
same time I needed to compile it less and less. When I was working on
the initial phase of the accessibility support, gnome-shell --replace
was enough. Then I needed to use jhbuild run, and worked most of the
times fine. And at that time, I was working on the shell regularly, so
as Owen mention on a different email, with practice you detect quickly
the weirdness and can keep working. But now, with most of the
gnome-shell accessibility in place, I only build it if I want to check
regressions on gnome-releases, or if any user report a bug. And now
stuff is more complicated. jhbuild replace/run doesn't work or fails
most of the times. As far as I see, there is not a clear and updated
documentation of how to run gnome-shell (so thanks Owen for starting
this thread). So in the end, I just gave up even before trying, even on
bugs that should be easy to fix. Or in other words, there is no way to
work on gnome-shell if you have one hour now and then.

 4) Hacking on libraries (gtk+)

For atk and at-spi2-atk jhbuild is clearly enough.

 5) Hacking on applications

Which ones of these do you do? How do you do it? Is 'jhbuild run' sufficient for your needs? Do you log 
into a jhbuild session? as yourself? as a test user? 

I usually have a test user, and switch between users. At some point this
wasn't an option while working on gnome-shell.


-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro (apinheiro igalia com)



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