queries about gnome-shell and documentation

[shirish शिरीष <shirishag75 gmail com>]

Hi all,
Newbie to the list and newbie to gnome-shell as well. So my
queries/questions may be off or seem beginner so be it.

I just browsed the page http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell . The
documentation feels incomplete.

I could fill in the blanks if need be but would need the expertise of
the people on the list. Please direct your attention to
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell#Building

a. What is JHBuild? There are going to be newbies (like me) who would
be confused where to get this JHBuild. Searched in the package manager
and found it is there in Debian.

$ aptitude show jhbuild

Description: flexible build script for package collections
 Jhbuild is a program that can be used to pull a number of modules
from CVS, Subversion, Bazaar and other types of repositories or from
tarballs and build them in the correct order.  Unlike some build
scripts, jhbuild lets you specify
 what modules you want built and it will then go and build those
modules plus dependencies.

I searched and linked the jhbuild page to the Gnome Shell/Building page .

>From the instructions given on the jhbuild it seems that one
has/should download the jhbuild via git, is this true also for
gnome-shell ?

This is the jhbuild in my system, for the record I'm on Debian Squeeze.

$ aptitude show jhbuild
Package: jhbuild
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 2.29.2-2
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Maintainer: Loic Minier <lool dooz org>
Uncompressed Size: 2,146 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5), python (>= 2.4), python-support (>= 0.90.0)
Recommends: bzr, cvs, git-core, mercurial, subversion, patch, wget | curl,
            autoconf, automake, gettext, pkg-config
Suggests: tla, darcs, python-pygraphviz
Description: flexible build script for package collections
 Jhbuild is a program that can be used to pull a number of modules from CVS,
 Subversion, Bazaar and other types of repositories or from tarballs and build
 them in the correct order.  Unlike some build scripts, jhbuild lets you specify
 what modules you want built and it will then go and build those modules plus
 dependencies.

 Although jhbuild was originally developed to build GNOME, it is now able to
 build a number of the modules in freedesktop.org's CVS. Extending it to handle
 new modules is usually trivial assuming the build infrastructure matches the
 other modules it handles

b. The actual building itself needs to be broken down. Now I do not
know whether I need to download the jhbuild first from git (depending
on the answer given above) and then the script (curl -O
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
/bin/bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh)

Some clarity here would be good . It would have been nice to have some
sort of fixed requirements given before one attempts something.  An
example of what I mean is here :-

http://adonthell.berlios.de/doc/index.php/Development:Compiling

I am talking about the pre-requisites.

c. A query, I saw the page about removing .la files
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RemovingLaFiles

What happens if one just deletes/removes the .la files and does the
other part as well

$ sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90removela <<< 'DPkg { Post-Invoke {
"rm /usr/lib*/*.la 2> /dev/null || true"; }; };'

but does not build/install gnome-shell then what would happen. I would
have liked some background info. on what were these .la files as there
were quite a few on my system (around 50-70 or so) which I have
removed both from /usr/lib and /usr/lib64.

Looking forward for the queries above before I push further.

Btw I'm subscribed to the list but mail delivery is turned off so
please CC me if anybody responds to the queries given above.

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3  8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17