Re: Common knowledge in jhbuild for funny modules



Le mercredi 09 août 2006 à 10:44 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero a écrit :
> > > Most of the build issues are due to the fact that we allow
> > > dependencies on cvs versions of freedesktop.org modules.  I'd like to
> > > propose that we move away from that, and just pick certain tarball
> > > versions to depend on at the beginning of a release; and require
> > > specific proposals to allow dependencies on newer tarball versions if
> > > issues come up.  Thoughts?  Comments?
> > 
> > I would be very interesting in hearing the opinions of people like
> > Josselin Mouette <joss debian org> who build new releases of GNOME for
> > their respective distributions regularly. How do they keep up? What
> > tricks are they using? Can we steal some of their ideas?

I'm not sure of what the question is exactly about, but I'll assume it
is about how to build GNOME for our environment and the issues
encountered.

This kind of issues is not GNOME-specific, and we have generic solutions
for them (or, for some issues, no solution at all).

The dependency tree hell is indeed where an important part of the
Debian/GNOME team work lies: mostly ensuring we track the correct
build-dependencies and ABI additions. For the former, we just convert
the versions found in configure.ac to Debian package versions, and for
the latter we read the changelogs. An important work of code factoring
(especially around debhelper and cdbs) allows us to have the same
building rules for most GNOME packages, and we can focus on dependencies
and upgrade path issues. Of course, on the top of that there are the
distribution-specific changes, like the customized GConf setup.

The rest is the work of a bunch of automated tools that run for all
Debian packages: of course, the buildd network ensures the build
dependencies are correct and that the code is portable (this is when we
report you those pointer to int casts bugs), but there are also people
that continuously run build daemons just to check that the current
archive can build fine, people that track ABI changes in libraries,
people that continuously run upgrade tests, etc.

> Doesn't Debian always build from tarballs?  Or are they pulling CVS
> snapshots?

We generally don't build CVS versions of whatever software, and just
backport the necessary patches to the latest stable versions. Unstable
versions (like GNOME 2.15) are rarely uploaded, and they generally are
to the "experimental" area, so that they don't break the main
distribution.

> I imagine that tarballs aren't that big of a problem, since they have
> been at least 'make distcheck'ed and if you are building a .deb or .rpm,
> you *do* want to install to system paths.

Better than distcheck when we are building a hundred of packages for a
new release, there is debdiff. Any files/dependencies added/removed are
tracked this way.
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin mouette ens-lyon org
`. `'                        joss debian org
  `-  Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom

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