Re: GNOME Build situation and BuildStream

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

Tristan,

again, it is impossible to reply to an email of this length. I can only give a few general comments, beyond that, we really need to sit down face-to-face and discuss this. I hope you are going to be at Guadec ?

My general comments:

What you are describing here (and in your previous communications) looks like a big, all-encompassing system, with lots of its own terminology and a complete worldview of how things should be built. I prefer a system that starts small and solves one problem initially, and then maybe grows over time.

The system you describe seems to be all about centralization, and about introducing a new language to describe what we build. That is by-and-large what we already have in various incarnations that you describe: jhbuild modulesets, the continuous manifest, flatpak runtimes. I can get behind the idea of unifying these into a single way of describing a multi-module build.

But I've also seen things mentioned like 'conversion scripts for flatpak'. And I think that is exactly the opposite of what we need for application building.

If we want to convince 3rd party applications to use flatpak, we can't treat it as an intermediate format that we generate from some other source, and just use somewhere in a centralized build process. We need to embrace it ourselves and use it, just like we expect 3rd party applications to use it.