Re: [gnome-love] another new face

[Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org>]

Elijah Newren wrote:
> 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.
Personally I don't think jhbuild is the problem. In my opinion it's a 
great script. The problem is that people check in code that breaks the 
build without that they notice it, because they for instance forgot to 
add a file to cvs. This problem can go unnoticed for quite some time.

Running jhbuild in tinderbox mode (for instance every 3 hours) and the 
possibility to view it's output on a website and automatically send it 
to a mailing list where all people with cvs access are automatically 
subscribed would improve the quality of cvs quite a bit.
I filed an RFE on this http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150130

I recently managed for the first time to build gnome with jhbuild, but 
it probably helped that it is close to the next release and that I'm now 
able to fix some problems with jhbuild. If I remember correctly I had to 
correct 3 things to get it to build

Can't somebody of Redhat or Novell/Ximian setup a machine for this? I 
guess they are the companies who work the most on gnome, so I think they 
would also be the largest beneficiaries. Also for people like us it 
would be a great help when just starting with gnome. You can then at 
least know if it is your fault or that it doesn't build because of 
breakage in CVS.

The advantage of a tinderbox webpage / mailing list is that you will 
have a whole community making sure that everything builds.

Now if I'm really sure that it's not my stupid error I file a bug, but 
these are not fixed very quickly. For instance I think Xrender does 
still does not build with jhbuild because of 
http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1224
It's already 10 days ago that I filed this bug

And there is missing a directory in anonymous cvs for 2 months already. 
See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117836
I filed the same bug but that also got resolved as not a gnome bug. I 
now get over this problem by downloading the tarball, but somebody who 
builds gnome for the first time will probably not think of this.

I'm afraid that due to these build issues people who want to contribute 
just give up and turn away from the GNOME project.

Jaap