BUILD: what I'm doing here

[Erik Walthinsen <omega cse ogi edu>]

On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Erik Andersen wrote:
> Cool.  You seem to know how to make RPMs... If you happen to have
> some spare time and interest, GnomeHack (nethack for Gnome) could use 
> someone that knows RPM to package it up.

So, I just got an account for CVS, and I'm getting all my local build
changes gathered up and sent out for verification.  Initially I'm going to
check with the package authors before checking things in, but hopefully
soon people will trust be enough to let me make the changes as necessary.

This stems from having a build environment set up on my work machine that
creates a full chroot'd environment, keeps track of and (soon)
automatically installs necessary dependencies before building packages.
Packages can be build from CVS, tarball, or SRPMS, and my goal is to
provide the latest and greatest RPMS for people doing development.  For
instance, I put glib-1.2.2 and gtk+-1.2.2 RPMS up on Saturday.

Unfortunately, I also had to build up a messy architecture for supporting
continual fixes to what was in CVS, which means shell scripts to muck with
files (patches don't work in most cases here).  I'd like to get away from
that, so I'm going to try to get all the build fixes committed to CVS.

Since I'm an RPM guy, I'm obviously focusing on RPM build issues, but a
lot of my fixes are generic, as in a package won't build at all without
them.  So I'm here to create and maintain spec files, fix build problems,
etc.  I will stay out of real code files myself, instead posting to the
authors if I have patches or just for notification.

If someone wants to step forward and maintain the debian build stuff
(whatever that is), we can work together to get a build environment going,
and keep both RPMs and DEBs building cleanly.  Beware that my machine is
probably not enough to build all of CVS once per day, RPM only, so another
machine somewhere will be necessary to build DEBs.

As a side note, I've found that a lot of packages have a blank AUTHORS
file.  If the owners of the various modules in CVS could put themselves in
the AUTHORS file, it will make my life a lot easier if I have to fix a
build problem.

Oh, and I'll prefix all my messages to gnome-devel-list with BUILD: so you
can visually (or with procmail or such) filter these messages out if you
don't want to see them.

TTYL,
    Omega

         Erik Walthinsen <omega@cse.ogi.edu> - Staff Programmer @ OGI
        Quasar project - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/quasar/
   Video4Linux Two drivers and stuff - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/v4l2/
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