Re: [gnome-love] Building GNOME HOWTO

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:45:41 -0500, Willie Walker
<William Walker sun com> wrote:

> I took a lot of notes along the way and spent this morning writing
> things up in TWiki style.  It may still be a little rough, but

Cool, nice writeup!

> hopefully this will be of use to someone.  My vision for it is
> as follows:  I did the preamble and such and wrote up my experiences
> for Fedora Core 3; others might want to add their own notes for
> their specific experiences on their distributions.

Note that regardless of the distribution you choose, your notes on
resolving build issues become obsolete extremely quickly.  (If it
doesn't build correctly, then it's a bug, and a high priority one, so
it tends to get fixed.  But, unfortunately, new build problems always
pop up).  So if you're trying to have a document that is always up to
date that lists solutions to all the build failures that happen,
you'll have an extremely difficult job...  Of course, listing as many
solutions as possible is still quite useful, but you just need to note
that you'll have to edit any such document fairly often (including
removing old stuff that has been made irrelevant)

>  I also envision
> creating a GNOME Developing HOWTO that walks people through the
> pain of now actually working with and modifying a fresh build.

sounds cool.

> NOTE: Allow for about 5 hours to build GNOME from scratch.  Also, you

This varies a _lot_.  Building on a machine at home has taken me over
a day; on my machine at school it's just 3-4 hours, I think.  So,
"about" might not be enough of a qualifier here.  :)

> <verbatim>
> # jhbuild tinderbox
> </verbatim>

Why tinderbox?  I think people building for the first time may have
better luck with "jhbuild build" because then they can interact with
the process and restart where they left off easier without doing nasty
manual kills of the jhbuild process and then manually restarting via a
command with the right switch/arguments to get it to restart at the
right place like you mention below.

> If you made it this far, you should have a build that works.  Phew.
> You probably want to keep things kind of safe - you can do this by
> preventing JHBuild from grabbing the latest sources from the network
> by adding the following line to ~/.jhbuildrc:
>
> <verbatim>
> nonetwork = True
> </verbatim>

Why exactly do you want to do this?  I'm confused as to why you would
want to do this or how it would be helpful.

> ---++ CCache

This section is cool; thanks for the howto (I've been meaning to learn
it).  However, why are you telling them to install it after having
already built from gnome instead of before?

> ---++ More Help and Documentation
>
> Hopefully, things will go smoothly for you.  If they don't, there are
> other places to turn.  As you work, please take really detailed notes
> and contribute them back to the community.  Over time, we can help
> each other to faster success by spreading the knowledge.

Considering the detail of the document, I was surprised that you had
no directions on how to run the newly built version of Gnome; that's
usually the first thing people want to try out.

> [[http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-
> gnome/][Developing in GNOME overview]] -
>       people like to you point you here.  It helps some if you want to
>       develop new GNOME apps.

Ooops.  My original goal was to make it easier for people to work on
developing Gnome modules, but I guess I stopped a bit early.  I need
to get back to that sometime...

Also, note that this guide has a full section on building gnome from
CVS (it even goes so far as to provide examples of the kinds of things
that can break and the basic steps required to try to resolve those
issues yourself).