Re: Common knowledge in jhbuild for funny modules

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 8/9/06, Jonathon Jongsma <jonathon jongsma gmail com> wrote:

> But if I remember correctly, Magnus Therning's struggles (mentioned
> above and documented on the gnome-love mailing list) were actually
> trying to build a tarball set (2.15.90 I believe) and he gave up in
> frustration after several weeks.  So while building from CVS is always
> going to be a lot more difficult, even building from tarballs seems to
> be too difficult for mere mortals.  And making the tarball releases
> easy to build by a normal developer would help immensely in getting
> more smoke-testing and polish for the GNOME releases.

Yes, that's correct.  One thing I'd like to point out, is those
wanting to try to build from tarballs may want to strongly consider
using GARNOME rather than the jhbuild tarball modulesets we've been
releasing.  joseph and guenther have been doing awesome work, they
have a huge community of testers, GARNOME can be used to build much
more than just modules from the official release sets, and GARNOME
actually intends to support users.  The jhbuild tarball modulesets are
more geared to advanced users who either just want to see what
versions we tested with (including external dependencies), or want to
help smoketest the modules in the official release sets (and only
those modules and only the exact versions used in that particular
release); there's not a big community doing that and it's reflected in
those modulesets.  For example, there was a bug in the 2.15.90
moduleset causing a patch to be misapplied (and thus breaking the
build) that wasn't caught for two weeks after the 2.15.90 release.
That's fine for us advanced users, because we can track it down and
fix it (or workaround it) rather quickly, but it derails those who are
just starting out.

My $0.02,
Elijah