Re: Status of GTK+ on Mac OS X?

[John Pye <john curioussymbols com>]

Hi Tor

Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>> Is there a buildbot somewhere running continuous integration testing of
>> GTK+ with the Mac platform? What about other platforms? Is that
>> something that the community is lacking in order to progress this stuff?
>>     
>
> Depends on what you mean with "buildbot". I guess buildbots are
> usually used to continuously build work-in-progress development
> branches. I don't know of such for Windows. There are
> cross-compilation projects in the openSUSE Build Service and also in
> Fedora's corresponding thing. (Fedora was first here, I must admit,
> but the openSUSE Build Service set of cross-compiled software is
> larger.) (Note that I work for Novell, which is the "sponsor" of
> openSUSE). But these compile stable releases, not in-progress
> development branches.
>   

I was talking about the Buildbot project, see here:
http://buildbot.net/trac
http://djmitche.github.com/buildbot/docs/0.7.11/#Introduction

Buildbot can be used on any system that supports Python, I've personally
used it on Fedora, Ubuntu and Windows XP. I have no doubt that it can
also work fine with Mac OS X as well.

One can set various automatic build tasks, eg every time a svn commit is
made, or daily, or whatever. One can also run virtualised hosts, I believe.

Buildbot can do building but also testing... it can run test suites and
report on failed test cases.

If something like this is not being used for QA of cross-platform GTK+,
then perhaps this would be a good thing to consider adding?

>> The issue is that there are no binaries. For Windows, a nice array of
>> prebuild binary zips are hosted on gnome.org,
>>     
>
> That's just because there is a volunteer (me) doing those builds, at
> least currently in my spare time. It's not because there would be some
> organisation that had allocated a resource and given him/her as task
> to produce such binaries. Nothing prevents a volunteer from doing the
> same for MacOSX. (As long as there is a reasonable consensus among
> those GTK+ maintainers that are interested in MacOSX that it would be
> a good thing to do; or are there for instance much differing opinions
> about how such binaries should be packaged and whatnot?)  

Although the Mac world of Frameworks and Bundles and Packages and
Applications makes things a bit different, I am quite certain that some
kind of generally-useful binary package could be released for GTK on
Mac. Currently the Framework release doesn't work for me on OS X.

If the status of GTK-OSX is rapidly changing then perhaps the best thing
is some kind of nightly build, coupled with some basic automated tests
to check that it works? This could be done with buildbot, or some other
similar system.

I think that GTK needs to avoid too many 'outsiders' feeling motivated
to bundle up their own packages for GTK, because it just makes the
community fragmented, and when those people stop maintaining their
packages, we end up with outdated stuff all over the place, like the
situation with http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net/ (which was really
excellent, but is no longer maintained). If someone's doing a binary
release, they should be encouraged to host it on the GTK website, if at
all possible.

Full-blown package managers are a bit different, mind you, and correct
packaging of GTK-OSX with Fink seems to me to be a good thing to pursue,
as well.

> My hope is that eventually the Windows binaries on ftp.gnome.org will
> originate from openSUSE Build Service and not from "manual" builds.
> We're not quite there yet, but it is getting closer.
>   

I had some thoughts along those lines too... I wrote some concepts on
that a while ago:
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/Concepts/Windows_Support

Has there been more progress?

Cheers
JP