[gnome-love] feedback on getting started.

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

Hi.

I posted here last week about getting started
compiling gnome.
I thought I'd give you some feedback on the things
I've tried & the problems I've encountered.

Firstly, before I asked on this list I looked on the
website.
http://developer.gnome.org/ is the logical place to
start, and the 'Getting Involved' link on that page is
where I imagine most people would go. This leads to
http://developer.gnome.org/helping/ and after that it
gets quite confusing. 
I would suggest that a link to
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove be placed on the
/helping/ page, as at the moment I don't see a way to
get to it from the gnome site. Also perhaps a mention
of jhbuild on http://developer.gnome.org/tools/.

Someone suggested I look at Developing with Gnome
[http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/]
I like the 'Things You Do Not Need To Learn Yet' page
:)
I suspect the rest of it is too advanced for someone
who doesn't have any C++ background. I tried compiling
the first example, and I got an error about 'Package
libglade-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search
path.' 
The Gtk2::GladeXML page could perhaps list the
packages that are required. I'm guessing
libgladexml-perl, but I'm not entirely sure.

Moving on...

I followed the instructions for jhbuild on
http://live.gnome.org/JhbuildOnUbuntu.

A early and simple problem I had was that ~/bin wasn't
in my path. For true idiot-proofing, the README file
in jhbuild could make a brief mention of this in the
'Configuring' section.

With the JhbuildOnUbuntu page I've had these problems:

joachim ubuntu:~$ jhbuild bootstrap
I get: jhbuild: Can't create /opt/gnome2/share/aclocal
directory

I created the folder & it worked properly. (Though it
does a HUGE amount of stuff... the guide could perhaps
warn that this is going to happen.)

joachim ubuntu:~$ jhbuild sanitycheck
install prefix is not writable

This is down to the line 
prefix = '/opt/gnome2'
in the sample config. The config does warn it needs to
be writable, but it might be better to either use
folder within the user's home in the sample, or
include the command to make /opt/gnome2 user-writable.
I fixed this problem and tried again:

joachim ubuntu:~$ jhbuild sanitycheck
automake-1.7 not found
automake-1.8 not found
automake-1.9 not found


thanks everyone for your suggestions :)

Joachim



                
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