Re: Cross Distro Spec Files

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 8/12/05, Mark Drago <markdrago mail com> wrote:
> Sorry for breaking the thread, but I just subscribed.
> 
> I have been working on a patch to jhbuild that will let it build
> packages that will be suitable for a tester to use and test the CVS
> version of gnome without having to compile the whole thing themselves.

Awesome.

> That is my main goal with this.  I'm not trying to make packages that a
> distributor would want to distribute or that people would want to use to
> get their main version of Gnome.

Good. Very sane of you :)

> I have already successfully made all of the packages that are in the
> meta-gnome-desktop build of gnome-2.12 in jhbuild (all 120 of them) and
> installed these packages on a clean, non-development install of FC4.  It
> wasn't entirely without issues, but it's getting better.

Wow. Impressive progress.

> I have attached the file that I have added to jhbuild, place it in
> jhbuild/jhbuild/commands/ if you want to try it out.  There are some
> other changes that you will have to make to actually start building
> packages.  I have a .rpmmacros file that changes the %_topdir to be in
> my home directory so I can build packages as a normal user.  There are
> probably other things that you would have to do, but I haven't figured
> it out yet.  I have also attached an abbreviated SPEC file that is
> created.  I chose to include the gnome-panel one because it has a bunch
> of dependencies and post scripts.  I cut out a bunch of the files in the
> middle of the list so that the file isn't all that large.

It would be helpful, maybe, if you threw up a bit of a HOWTO in the
wiki somewhere? That would make it easy for people on other distros to
add their notes as well, assuming some of them start doing the same.

> It should be fairly easy to port this over to create non-RPM packages,
> but I'm not too familiar with how .debs are built.

:/ I'm not either. I'm guessing, though, that once you get this
reliable and we can distribute rpms, someone will see the publicity
and hack up some support. Which will be nice for me :)

> I really think that
> this will improve the testing of Gnome once everything runs smoothly.

I agree. I've said repeatedly that GNOME got its best testing pre-2.0,
when we offered daily packaged builds on a couple key distros, and I
hope we can get this to happen again. Thanks for the effort, Mark.

> My ultimate goal is to make everything yum-mable or apt-get-able so that
> testers can get the most recent version of Gnome from CVS every day and
> the only hassle is downloading 120-odd packages.  We'll see how it goes.

Please keep us up to date as this moves along- we might be able to get
folks to donate bandwidth for this.

Rock on, and thanks for letting us know about this, Mark-
Luis