Re: GNOME Shell 3.29.92

[Brion Vibber <brion pobox com>]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:21 AM Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org> wrote:

Tarball releases are provided largely for distributions to build
packages. If you are interested in building GNOME Shell from source,
we would recommend building from version control using the build
script described at:

 https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell

Not only will that give you the very latest version of this rapidly
changing project, it will be much easier than get GNOME Shell and its
dependencies to build from tarballs.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what is the current preferred way of building and testing GNOME Shell? There's no section on that wiki page about building that I can find.

There is a link to https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/BuildGnome but I can only find examples of application builds, not the shell, and I'm uncertain whether the shell has specific other requirements. The development guide page at https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Development refers to jhbuild, but jhbuild instructions say it's obsolete and replaced by BuildStream.

I was able to build gnome-shell with BuildStream, but have had some troubles figuring out how to run it, and am a bit unsure if that's actually supported as various old posts describe them as not yet working together.

If I do 'bst shell core/gnome-shell.bst' and try to 'gnome-shell --x11 -r' in the workspace, clutter errors out unable to find a GL driver. I'm unsure whether this is because I'm using the Nvidia proprietary drivers and they're not available inside the workspace, or whether it wouldn't work even if I figure out how to fix this. (In a pinch I can probably switch back to Nouveau temporarily, if that would work.)

Note the patch I'm working on changes both JS and C portions, so I can't just swap out the live JS.

Thanks!

-- brion