GNOME Modulesets migrating to BuildStream

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

Hi All !

    Following my earlier proposals (long[0], shorter[1]), our
discussions with the release team in the unconference days of GUADEC,
and some followup internal release team discussion[2], I'm proud to
announce (with my spiffy new release team hat on) our intent to stop
maintaining the GNOME releases using JHBuild and start using
BuildStream[3] for builds and releasing GNOME.

Yes, this is going to be a disruptive change for many who are used to
doing everything with JHBuild, but it will be for the best; refer to my
opening mail in the above reffered thread[2] for a list of the
immediate benefits.

For the short term, we will continue to support and maintain the
JHBuild modulesets, using the automated conversion system (which I
previously outlined in my blog[4]), so you can continue to use JHBuild
to build from upstrem maintained GNOME modulesets for a short time, but
a cut off day is going to have to happen in order to unblock my work on
further improvements (like conditionally using the same modulesets to
generate the GNOME Flatpak SDKs, and creating bootable images which
developers can use to test more integrated components like gnome
session, gnome shell, GDM and gnome keyring).

This cut off wont happen in 2017, but will happen before the release of
GNOME 3.28 stable. From now on, we will be creating the development
releases using BuildStream.

You are all encouraged to try BuildStream, following the wiki page we
setup[5] which will replace the official getting started wiki page[6],
help us find and address any problems you might encounter before the
transition is complete.

In closing, we've been making a lot of promises for a year now, and I
think we've delivered on a lot of them so far, I'm happy with the
progress and it wont stop here !

Best Regards,
    -Tristan


[0]: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-April/msg00071.html
[1]: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-July/msg00027.html
[2]: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2017-October/msg00018.html
[3]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/BuildStream
[4]: https://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2017/06/01/continuous-bst-conversions-of-gnome-modulesets/
[5]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/BuildSystemComponentBst
[6]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/BuildSystemComponent