Re: Continuous Builds in GNOME

["Sebastian Geiger (Lanoxx)" <lanoxx gmx net>]

Hi Emanuelle,

I just wanted to pitch into this discussion and say thanks to you (and 
everyone else working on this) for putting all the effort into fixing 
build issues and improving continuous integration.

I have been a developer for different gnome components for a while, but 
I am not such a frequent contributor that I know all the internals of 
most core components. So when a module breaks during a jhbuild, then I 
am often quite lost and need a few hours of google, asking people at 
#gtk or #gnome as well as trial and error.

Most of the time I just want to "quickly get a fairly recent build" and 
then "write a small patch" to fix something in one of the gnome modules. 
When that happens I may be able to set aside a few hours or half a day 
but not a whole week. However most times this half day is wasted 
battling with jhbuild and trying to get a working environment that not 
only builds glib but which actually comes as far as to build the module 
for which I wanted to write a patch in the first place. When I have 
already spend 4 hours and jhbuild is just building module 20 out of 90, 
and breaking on some unresolvable dependency, missing library, some 
obscure configure or make error or what ever, then this is usually the 
point were I just go and do something else.

So again, all your effort its highly appreciated.

I really hope that at some point in the future its possible to just type 
`jhbuild build` then go away to work on something else when then come 
back to find the build finished and login to the ready jhbuild session. 
If on top of that this would work not only on the most recent fedora 
"from last week" or so, but on the most recent Ubuntu _LTS_ or Debian 
_stable_, then that would be really awesome. And it would mean that I 
could spend more time testing gnome modules, fixing bugs and help to 
improve gnome rather then spending days trying to get all modules building.

Thanks and Cheers
Sebastian

On 03/06/16 10:42, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> Still, people consider Continuous somebody else's problem; if it
> "breaks on Continuous" but not on a maintainer machine, then who
> cares?
>
> Even if we magically got the resources (build machines, at least one
> person working on the infrastructure side, volunteer work to improve
> the tooling), the attitude of "my module is my fiefdom, if a build
> breaks*you*  fix it" has to change.