Re: Canonical jhbuild documentation

[Carlos Soriano Sanchez <csoriano redhat com>]

Hello

(sorry for the delay, there were some problems with the email)

A little of history of the latest wiki jhbuild pages:
When I created the series of BuildGnome & CodeContributionWorkflow my intention was creating a simple 
straightforward workflow
for contributing to Gnome for newcommers to Gnome and/or FOSS. So the simpler the better.
When I started contributing Gnome 2 years ago I was overwhelmed with the quantity of text I had to read and 
all the things
that I have to took into account (if I have a jhbuilrc previously, if I have ./bin already in my bashrc, 
etc.) and things
that I had to understand (where jhbuild install itself, the jhbuildrc configuration file etc.). I just wanted 
to get started
ASAP to start getting excited.
With BuildGnome I merged some of the obsoletes guides. iirc I deleted 5 wiki pages of jhbuild at that time.
In the effort to merge all the guides I talked with the authors of those pages and tried to get some feedback 
with
BuildGnome from them and other people inside Gnome and outside. Seems some people inside Gnome were keen of 
deleting
JhbuildIntroduction. So I just let it there. But we should definitely delete it now, it no longer adds 
anything to the game.
Then a few weeks after creating BuildGnome and CodeContributionWorkflow someone (Ryan right?) created 
HowDoI/Jhbuild 
(because he didn't know they were already tutorials of Jhbuild in the wiki), which is a very well explained 
and large
guide about jhbuild basics and covers all cases i.e. someone who already could have some jhbuildrc in some 
folder.
But that vision goes against my intention for newcomers. i.e. they don't have a jhbuildrc.

BuildGnome it is not a generic jhbuild guide, it's a guide for get started asap in Gnome which uses jhbuild 
to build and run
Gnome applications. That's it. I don't think a newcomer needs more.

Then, I didn't want to modify Jhbuild oficial documentation because Jhbuild can be very generic tool, and 
those users
were not my target.

But if we agree that Jhbuild is just used only for contributing Gnome, then we could merge some simple guide 
as
the official documentation.

In conclusion, I would like to have something as the official documentation/quickstart like BuildGnome with 
an "advanced stuff"
link for those who wants more. Probably after a few patches they get a git account, and then they want a 
jhbuildrc, to have their
account. But at that point they wont be scared that much with the documentation, and at least they already 
got started without too much frustration.

I already spent time in newcomers and wikis, since it's a priority for me since I started contributing to 
Gnome, so I don't mind
expending more and get it done better if we agree on something.

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to have xdg-app and no longer need Jhbuild for this =)

Cheers,
Carlos Soriano