Re: [gnome-love] feedback on getting started.

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 10/31/05, Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com> wrote:
> 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.

Cool, thanks.

> Firstly, before I asked on this list I looked on the
> website.
> http://developer.gnome.org/ is the logical place to
> start,

Yes, logical.  Too bad developer.gnome.org does more harm than good
(see http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/contents/2003/11/25-gnomedevel/read,
for example).  *sigh*

> 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.

In particular, the "Joining Gnome" link (which is the first link on
that page) has so many problems that it would cause far more damage
than good (it was once a good document; it's just about 5 years too
late to have any relevant and correct information).  I listed well
over a dozen glaring problems with it about a year ago...  *sigh*

> 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/.

Perhaps a rewrite of developer.gnome.org.  :-)  The GnomeLove wiki
page suggestion you made is good; an alternative to consider is
http://live.gnome.org/JoinGnome.

> 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.

??? ... Yeah, I guess I really did need to split my guide into four so
that people only try to read the parts relevant to the bindings they
are using.  (If you're just going to use gtk instead of gtkmm, you
should only read the C parts of the manually instead of the C++ parts;
I tried to mark them clearly but I guess I didn't do so well).  I used
the excuse that I was waiting for Shaun's gnome-doc-utils stuff to be
ready to do coolor stuff with the guide, but honestly I've just been
sidetracked by too many other things.

> 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.'

So, it sounds like you didn't install any of the development libraries
on your distro (in particular, libglade, known as 'libglade2-dev' on
my system).  I guess I could try to add instructions for this
somewhere, but it's different for every distro and so I just assumed
people would install the development libraries themselves.  Thanks for
pointing out that I need to at least mention this.

> The Gtk2::GladeXML page could perhaps list the
> packages that are required. I'm guessing
> libgladexml-perl, but I'm not entirely sure.

Yeah, similar situation, since package names tend to differ across distros...

> 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.

Oops, not only did the wiki page you refer to forget to mention that,
but I also forgot it in my guide...

> With the JhbuildOnUbuntu page I've had these problems:
>
> joachim ubuntu:~$ jhbuild bootstrap
> I get: jhbuild: Can't create /opt/gnome2/share/aclocal
> directory

The first step listed on the JhbuildOnUbuntu page:
  sudo mkdir -p /opt/gnome2
is incomplete.  You also need to give yourself permission to write to
the directory using chown (covered in the 'basic instructions' at
http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/ch04.html
though Ubuntu may not work quite the same due to the root/su/sudo
differences).  Someone (you or the JhbuildOnUbuntu wiki page writers)
ought to update the JhbuildOnUbuntu wiki page to cover this.  ;-)

> 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.)

Well the point of the bootstrap is to install about 10 different
programs to make sure you have all the appropriate build tools and new
enough versions of the programs, so yes.

<snip>
> 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

Did you repeat the 'jhbuild bootstrap' after fixing up your install
prefix so that you could write to it?

Cheers,
Elijah