Re: [gnome-love] Best way to run Development/CVS Gnome?

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 7/9/05, Steven Garrity <stevelist silverorange com> wrote:
> I'm wondering what the best setup might be for someone who's interested
> in keeping up on Gnome development in CVS. I'd like to be running the
> latest CVS for testing, feedback, and hopefully some patches.
>
> What I'm wondering is, what are the setups that work best for people? Do
> you keep the latest development stuff on your primary machine? Do you
> have a dual boot with dev/stable? Do you have a secondary machine?

I install with jhbuild into /opt/gnome2, while the stable
distro-shipped stuff is all available in /usr.  The first time I did
so (well, also when I used garnome before I switched to jhbuild), I
created a separate user and logged in as them when using the
development version of Gnome.  But problems were rare enough that I
stopped doing that and I no longer use a separate account; I just do
all my work (even my normal school stuff that is totally unrelated to
anything Gnome) under the development version of Gnome that I have
compiled.  I then update that development version as time permits
(i.e. I may have a version that's only a few hours or days old though
at times I may be running a development version that's up to a month
or two out of date).

You could go with dual boot or a secondary machine, but that sounds
like a lot more work and I don't see any real benefit (unless you're
totally paranoid about messing something up, I guess).

> Do a lot of developers run the development version of distros (Rawhide,
> Breezy, etc.)?

Some do.  The more lazy ones.  ;-)  This has its own tradeoffs, e.g.
takes less time to update (don't need to compile), has a little more
testing and thus you are less likely to have problems with any given
module, are less up to date (though usually not by too much,
especially given how I sometimes let my CVS installation age by quite
a bit before updating).  The two most important factors to consider,
though, are that (1) you're becoming a beta-tester for the entire
distro instead of just Gnome (personally, I don't want to waste time
fixing issues in drivers or initscripts or such if any happen to come
up), and (2) things are being installed over the stable versions in
/usr.  So, if you go this route, you'd be more likely to want to try
dual/boot, a secondary machine, or a Xen virtual machine.

> Also, do I understand the technology correctly that Xen might be a good
> way to run a development version of Gnome (or whatever system) as a
> virtual machine on top of your stable primary desktop?

Again, sounds like overkill to me (unless you go the Breezy/Rawhide
route), though Xen seems to have this coolness factor to it that might
make it worth trying anyway.  But maybe that's just because I haven't
tried it out yet.  *shrug*

> Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated. Thanks,

Just don't forget that this advice was free, and worth what you paid for.  ;-)

Cheers,
Elijah