Re: How do you hack on the bleeding edge of Gnome?

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Wed, 2012-04-18 at 17:55 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> I don't want to blame jhbuild; this is a larger problem with how we have
> structured the development of Gnome.  I'm happy that (e.g.) Colin
> Walters is working on ostree
> ( http://git.gnome.org/browse/ostree/tree/README.md )

I'll let people know when it's actually more useful than jhbuild and/or
rebuilding debs/rpms.  That time isn't yet, but I am hopeful some
ambitious people might try it along the 3.6 timeframe.  We'll see!

> , but while it
> seems like a truly fantastic way to install prebuilt binaries without
> disrupting your system, it doesn't solve the problem of building those
> binaries in the first place - correct me if I'm wrong!

It does, the binaries come from a build server.  You *can* build
everything locally, and that's a well-defined process, and actually
not as painful as you might think.  On my laptop it happened overnight.

The issue is not so much time as unreliability.  I've tried to address
some of those with jhbuild, but there are two major ones remaining:

1) Building from unclean source tree - stale Makefiles, leftover
   binaries, etc.
2) Our lack of multi-module continuous integration

> So this mail is about:  how do *you* hack on Gnome on an everyday basis?

jhbuild mainly; though sometimes I do resort to mashing snapshots
of git revisions into rpm and running them in a VM.

> Do people get their source trees built only up to the modules they hack
> on, and ignore the rest (been there, done that)?  

Note that with 'jhbuild sysdeps' you can avoid building a lot of things.
Did you try it?

> (Side thoughts:  how many people have *actually* tested a full 3.4
> install?)

"3.4 install" is not fully defined; there's distribution and
architecture in the mix for example.  Too many developers are on 64
bit and a lot of compiler warnings from 32 bit tend to pass unseen...

Anyways bottom line here - I'll still be reviewing patches to jhbuild
if you have ideas for how we could make that better.

I do have one: teaching jhbuild how to modify the system gdm
configuration so you can log in.  This *really* should have been out
of the box years ago, and would be a pretty easy entry point for
someone who wants to contribute.