GNOME Snapshots

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

This is chopped from my blog, since it's of direct relevance to the
Packaging Project.
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Once upon a time, Ximian did regular CVS snapshots of the gnome tree.
And people enjoyed this, because it meant people could test CVS GNOME
without having to go through lengthy build processes.

During the QA BOF in GUADEC, we discussed how nice the snapshots were
for people trying to test GNOME. It turned out that Ximian had a box
allocated to doing GNOME shapshots, but no-one to run it. Because Ximian
is full of lovely cuddly people, they said that we could have a go at
building community snapshots with it. It's now been put in their colo
and had an OS and build-buddy installed.

It is my goal to reform a team of "build sheriffs" in the near future.
The idea here would be that the box could build snapshot packages for a
variety of distributions and the build sheriffs could a) keep CVS
buildable if it breaks and b) keep the configuration files for building
the binaries up to date. This is obviously something which is going to
need some community buy-in if it's going to succeed.

Christopher Olsen and myself have been working on the necessary
infrastructure to make this happen without needing to give everyone and
his dog root access to the box :) The infrastructure isn't quite ready
to be used at large by the community yet, but as part of our "getting
something working" strategy we've churned out conf files (equivalent
of .spec) files for the first bit of the GNOME build tree. This drew
some complaints from the GNOME packaging community, but I want to
emphasise that the conf files in CVS are there for testing purposes
only. The community will be able to play with all of this when we've
finished :)

Snapshots are obviously similar in goals to the GPP's goals, so let me
outline a few things here:

      * We're using build-buddy because we will want packages for lots
        of different distributions, including (at least) debian-based
        distributions such as Ubuntu. It's unfortunate that the
        existing .spec files can't simply be copied, but that's life.
        They are useful for working out dependencies when writing
        ximian-build.conf files though :)
      * Build-buddy may be a bad solution for the GPP. It has been said
        [1] that build-buddy produces ugly spec files that are less than
        ideal for final packages. If that's the case it separates our
        efforts a bit more.
      * On the other hand, I am sure that if the GPP wants to use our
        build-buddy host for anything, there would be no problems with
        that. In this case we can see how closely we can work together
        to use the same conf files.
      * Some things aren't decided. We still need to talk to Ximian
        about levels of access that various people are allowed to have
        in terms of actually running and admining the box, since it is
        within their firewall.
      * Please wait a bit more and give us a chance, here! :)

It's gonna be cool. I promise.

--
Andrew

[1] http://www.advogato.org/person/thomasvs/diary.html?start=148