Re: [gnome-love] jhbuild tutorial and daily build status

[Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org>]

Donald Raikes wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have taken the suggestions that were made yesterday, and updated my website accordingly.
> I am hoping to do a daily build of gnome using jhbuild, and place the results on the website. I have also 
> created a quick tutorial on how to use jhbuild there as well.
>
> Please see:
> http://www.draikes.com/jhbuild/building-gnome.html
>
> I would appreciate any feedback that could make the site better.
Great work!!

Now some feedback

1. I don't think advising people to use the tinderbox mode to do 
compilation is a good idea, because you do not get any visual feedback 
for a long long time. "jhbuild build" stops after each error.
I understand that a log can be handy, I  thought of using
"jhbuild | tee log.txt", but it's not completely transparent, maybe we 
should make a patch for jhbuild that it can dump a log file.

2. A small thingy. Your talking on your website about installing gnome 
in /opt/gnome2 but from the build logs I see that you install it in 
/home/gnomer/gnome2/ This might be confusing for a new developer. I 
don't know if /opt/gnome2 is a real good solution because I believe some 
distros install gnome there out of the box. So I suggest to just keep 
them the same

3. Because of the bug I was talking about earlier, I was suprised that 
Xrender build on your machine.(It still does not build on my machine if 
I do not patch it) In the log 
http://www.draikes.com/jhbuild/20040909-08:11/Xrender.txt I see that you 
maybe apply some patches
<snip>
************************************************************
2004-09-09 08:36:42.128 | Checking out Xrender
************************************************************
cvs -z3 -q -d :pserver:anoncvs cvs freedesktop org:/cvs/xlibs update -dP 
-A .
? .patch.20040905
? configure.ac.patch.20040905
</snip>

I don't think you should apply patches. Then people expect it to work 
out of the box, while it actually doesn't


4. I think you should add something on how to run cvs gnome after you 
compiled it. Maybe steal it  ;-) of the pages of Elijah or James (links 
see below) or make a reference.

5. If I look at todays build it seems to end with the configure stage of 
mozilla. But that seems successful. So it's weird the log stops there.

6. I like the output logs. Just nice and simple.

7. Suggestion
jhbuild has the possibility to build other software hosted on gnome cvs. 
(gnome-system-tools to name one) Maybe also nice if those got build.


In the end it would be nice if that cvs building/ jhbuild got its place 
developer.gnome.org site somewhere in near the future.
The contents of your site, the jhbuild site 
http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/jhbuild/ and the tutorial of Elijah 
http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/ would 
be a great starting point.
Then potential developers can easily find the relevant info
Also a couple of machines running distcc (distributed compiling) would 
then be really helpful to speed up the builds

Wouldn't setting this all up be nice gnome-love project?


Cheers,

Jaap