Re: [gnome-love] another new face

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 01:39:56 +0530, Baishampayan Ghose <b ghose gmail com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> > Assuming the tarballs and CVS have no problems, sure.  But I have
> > never yet been able to build or even rebuild Gnome without some kind
> > of manual intervention in the build process.
> What's more, I have seen jhbuild screw up things in a worse manner.
> Recently, when I tried to  compile GNOME CVS HEAD using jhbuild it
> just won't compile ! 

Right, this happens _all_ the time.  And it's totally unpreventable. 
Updating code means you could introduce an error that prevents things
from compiling.  CVS HEAD changes constantly.  Everyone is careful,
but you just can't totally prevent human error.  If any one person
messes up and commits code that won't compile, anyone compiling Gnome
from CVS will run into a snag.  It's not uncommon that I'll revert I'm
compiling to CVS from a few days before in order to work around
something that I can't figure out.

> But when I tried to compile all the 88 modules by
> hand, it compiled very nicely with just a few tweaks here and
> there(mostly path related).

Were you compiling from CVS or from tarballs?  If from tarballs, you
have to understand that extra precautions are taken to make sure they
compile; tarballs don't change every minute of the day whereas CVS
HEAD can and sometimes does.

> So I believe we need an unified installer tool (a successor to make,
> more advanced) which will make the installation procedure more easy
> and accessible.

jhbuild is one such tool.  If there's a problem with it, we just need to fix it.


Elijah