Re: rebuilding Gnome without complete erase

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 1/18/06, Rod Butcher <rbutcher hyenainternet com> wrote:
> I run an unstable Gnome under /usr, which I periodically rebuild from

under /usr?  That's not what I'd recommend but if you like it or have
a good reason for it go ahead.  I just tend to like to have a backup
in case I screw up the jhbuild install (which I sometimes do, either
by pick & choosing updates and missing some I should have gotten, or
by having a nasty bug in some patch I was making and testing), so I
use /opt/gnome2 (for testing of cvs anyway; I also test tarball builds
in a different prefix).

> cvs head - the idea is that if I use it for regular work I'm more likely
> to detect any bugs. I just update source from cvs and recompile and
> install on top of old versions. Can I assume that old versions of libs
> that stack up will just become unused, and that any new builds will
> automatically link against the latest lib versions ? Or do I really need

Yeah, basically.  There might be problems somewhere, but I haven't
ever run across them doing this with my testing of cvs.

> to erase the whole environment before a rebuild to ensure that all
> running Gnome components are indeed the latest ? Or is there a relibale
> uninstall mechanism ?

You can manually run "make uninstall" for each module to clean things
out, if you want.  But, if you update and build several times without
running "make uninstall" in between each time, then when you do
finally run it, it will only clean out the stuff from the latest
install.  However, if you want a clean build environment before each
install, it is much easier to just install to a different prefix and
purge your checkoutdir and prefix before each install.  This is
actually something that I do when testing out tarball releases, it
goes something like this:

$ rm -rf ~/cvs/tarball-gnome2/*  # Purge checkout directory
$ rm -rf /opt/tarball-gnome2/*     # Purge install prefix
$ jhbuild bootstrap
$ jhbuild build

Hope that helps,
Elijah