Re: Preferred method to set up your development environment

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2007-03-03 at 17:41 +0100, Martin Swientek wrote:
> Hallo,
> 
> I've got a problem to connect to a webdav account using nautilus. I want
> to take this as an opportunity to start digging into the code and trying
> to find out what's going wrong. And maybe I can contribute something to
> the Gnome development as I've enjoyed using Gnome for some time now.
> 
> To start I've managed to build and run the latest Nautilus from svn in
> my stable Gnome 2.16.2 environment on Gentoo. I can imagine that this
> approach may lead to some problems tracking the needed dependencies. For
> example, the Nautilus I've build now uses all the stable libs from my
> distribution. So If I want to track down my webdav problem, I'll also
> have to build gnome-vfs from svn and make sure Nautilus uses this
> instead, and so on.
> 
> So I'm wondering, what's your preferred method to setup your development
> environment? Do you use a stable Gnome system delivered and maintained
> by your distribution like I did? Or do you use a complete Gnome
> development version like 2.17.xx?

I think there are three main approaches:
* Use jhbuild (or something like it) to build a complete copy of Gnome
in a separate prefix, and use that
* Run an unstable distro that tracks the latest gnome
* "wing it" and install just the package you work on and what new
requirements it needs manually

The last version is the most risky as it can mess up your system a bit
and it requires some knowledge of the gnome depenencies. 

I personally use jhbuild.

For the specific case of nautilus 2.18 you might be able to run it
without so much dependencies, because there aren't a lot of changes from
2.16 and 2.18.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a deeply religious dishevelled paramedic who hangs with the wrong crowd. 
She's a cynical cigar-chomping politician living homeless in New York's 
sewers. They fight crime!