Re: newbie develper questions...

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 02:38:32AM -0700 or thereabouts, simon emmett wrote:
> I am trying to upgrade to gnome 1.2 as I want to get involved with 
> developing gnome/gnome office. I thought I would do it the interesting way 
> and download all of the source and compile it etc etc.

Well, interesting may be the word for it :)
 
> Firstly, is 1.2 supposed to be a stable version (I downloaded from the 
> stable directories on ftp.gnome.org so i thought it was)? I had several 
> problems making/compiling. Is there a list of known issues/workarounds for 
> this version???

"The list" is basically a bunch of posts to gnome-list and on gnotices
where people have said "I have trouble with this tarball, I had to.."
I don't think anyone's collected them together publically, nor yet
reported half of them to the maintainers, as several of them have
apparently been there a while. 

I did collect a bunch relating to tarball->rpm compilation because
that's what I like to do: : this is what was on gnotices in the 1.2
release thread at the time I went hoovering up:

   I whant just to say that there is a bug into the
   gnome-games-1.2.0.tar.gz spec file. The number of version must be
   1.2.0 and not 1.1.90 to allow creation of RPMS files wiht rpm -tb
   command.
   There is also an other problem with the gnome-utils-1.2.0.tar.gz
   package. When trying to make a RPM there is an error :
   "line 15: Unknown tag: BuildRequires: e2fsprogs-devel"
   I don't know how to build it
      ----
   Update your rpm.. also rpm -ta will _not_ work on gnome-utils Extract
   the spec by hand and build it.
      ----
   Actually, I did a rpm -ta on the gnome-utils 1.2 package. I just had
   to detar it, go into the gfloppy directory, rename the gfloppy.spec
   file to something else (so rpm doesn't see it), and then recompress
   the modified directory into a tar file. Then, it built just fine (had
   to do this trick with ORBit, too and one or two others). Otherwise,
   RPM would just build gfloppy, and not the whole package.
      ----
   downloaded all of the tar.gz files to use rpm -ta to create my own RPM
   files, but some (notably gnumeric) compile but no RPM files are
   written out.
      ----
   This usually means one thing. The spec file %file section is screwed.
   I'd suggest you use rpm -ta again then try to read at the end before
   it exits if it complains about missing files. If yes, go the rpm build
   directory. This is usually /usr/src/redhat/BUILD under RedHat, but can
   be found by doing an rpm --showrc and looking for it.
   Once in the build directory, use gnome search tool or simply find and
   locate those missing files then change the paths accordingly in the
   .spec file and restart the whole shabang!
   Hope this helps.

> Would people advise I just download the RPMS and take it from there?

Well, if you have no time, then probably. If you want the sources 
around to poke at, add silly patches to and so on, then I think you
need the tarballs, unless there are .src.rpms knocking around somewhere.

People have also posted updated specfiles to gnome-list. Email me
privately if you want to try them, as I tried to collect them as they
appeared. I have not yet downloaded the tarballs, so I have no idea
whether these specfile changes work, which is why I haven't thrown
them at maintainers in case they missed them :)

Telsa