Re: strawman (Was Re: build systems)

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 23:05 -0500, Adam Schreiber wrote:
> On Nov 11, 2007 10:52 PM, Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
> > It would be great to release a suite of GNOME apps for Windows (maybe even
> > OS X) along with our tarballs every six months -- to grow our audience and
> > potential developer pool -- with the least amount of work possible. :-)
> 
> While I agree this would increase the audience, I wonder about the
> feasibility.
> 
> * Do enough maintainers/developers still run windows systems and have
> Windows developement experience?
> 
> * Would this require a new pool of developers to be aquired before
> such a release?
> 
> * Would this introduce new bugs that would be difficult to track down
> and kill without access to a Windows development environment?
> 
> * Would there be an active group, similar perhaps to gnome-love
> (windows-love?) that would patrol windows related bugs?

I actually regard Windows / OS X support as an (important) secondary
goal. The primary goal, I think, of this exercise would be to make it so
easy to start hacking on GNOME applications that any Windows / OS X
programmer can do it. E.g. the whole shrink-wrapped IDE experience. 

For example, on Linux the Eclipse plug-in would use PackageKit to fetch
the appropriate -devel packages (e.g. on Fedora equivalent to 'yum
install /usr/lib/pkgconfig/hal.pc'). E.g. it would be something like
this. E.g. Joe Coder

 - Starts Eclipse
 - Selects "New project from SVN"
 - Browse GNOME SVN; selects the Totem module
 - Presses F11 to build and run the code
 - Edits source code

 - When happy with the feature: Generates and submits patch through
   existing Eclipse UI to the GNOME Bugzilla

   - Alternative: Commits the patch directly to GNOMESVN

 - Then: Generates a .deb or .rpm he can put on his blog for people
   to try his new feature.

  - Optional: connects to the OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. build
    systems to upload the changes

That's the user experience I'm after. The whole IDE thing.

> * There would probably have to be an easy and somewhat trusted method
> of installing binary packages for Windows. (Winbuntu?)

I think the Win32 implementation of the hypothetical program that does
builds will just produce a MSI installable package on Windows. Details,
but as they say, the devil is in the detail.

And, hey, there's this great movie with the quote: "If you build it,
they will come". Especially now with GTK+ becoming much more powerful
(e.g. growing a VFS and soon a DConf backend) a lot of our apps will,
pretty soon, just start working on Win32 and OS X.

The point really is that with a declarative, not imperative, build
specification language (e.g. without any of the UNIX cruft) it suddenly
becomes feasible to think about writing a native and feature-par Win32 /
OS X implementation of the build system that uses native constructs and
integrates with native components. Such as spitting out MSI installers
and what not.

     David