Re: [gnome-love] Building GNOME HOWTO

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 19:41:28 -0500, Willie Walker
<William Walker sun com> wrote:

> I try to take detailed notes on just about everything I do, and I'm
> always happy to share the knowledge when it can help prevent others
> from going through the same pains I did.

That's awesome.  The more people that do that, the better.  :-)

> > 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)
>
> Darn.  Since I was writing this up in TWiki format, I was hoping
> this could also be some form of 911.  That is, people could just
> enter their problems (and hopefully solutions!) into the TWiki as
> they went along.  Kind of a nice community document.  This all
> really depends upon the style and trust of the GNOME community,
> though.

Well, it's still useful, but I don't think it's something that could
be depended upon to get solutions.  Things just break and are fixed
too fast.  Bugzilla queries and/or backing up to versions of CVS from
a few days in the past seem to be the easiest ways of dealing with
problems to me.  :-)

> > 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.
>
> I dunno - I just found tinderbox much easier to read than running
> through a very long log.  I like to read the *whole* thing (I'm one
> of those anal-retentive "no warnings should ever appear" types), and
> tinderbox has a pretty nice way of organizing and coloring the
> output.

Yes, that's a definite advantage.  See below for it's disadvantage, though.

> > > <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.
>
> I wanted to do this because I was building against the latest stuff.
> My initial experience was that people seemed to check stuff in before
> really testing it, which could cause the remainder of the build to
> break.  This happened to me and it drove me nuts.  I didn't want to
> suffer because someone wasn't being thorough, but I also wanted to be
> somewhat up to date.

Ah, I think I figured out why you did the nonetwork stuff.  Since you
were running tinderbox, you restarted the build when you later found
there were problems.  That means you'd have to wait for absolutely
every module to build correctly before you had a working tree.  That's
painful.  If you had used "jhbuild build", then whenever there was a
problem the build would stop, and when you resolved it, you would just
pick up where you left off.  No need to restart, and you're always
making forward progress.  And, no need to disable cvs updates just to
"keep your system stable" because you're not going back and rebuilding
something that already successfully built.


> > ---++ 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?
>
> Well...I like to reduce the number of variables when doing something
> new.  CCache was new to me, and I was having major issues trying to
> build GNOME.  So...I'd rather eliminate ccache as a suspect and just
> get things going first.  There's always time to try to take aim at
> your foot with a gun later.  :-)

Oh, right, I should have thought of that.  Yeah, I agree that it
belongs at the end.


Elijah