Re: jhbuilding metacity

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 10/26/05, Philip O'Brien <philip obrien dal ca> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm pretty new at this, so please bear with me  :)
>
> I've checked out metacity from the CVS.  After reading the code and playing with
> it for a couple weeks, I'm ready to compile and run and play and hack, and all
> that fun...
>
> I was about to jhbuild metacity (just moved into the metacity dir and ran
> `jhbuild`), but it wants to checkout and compile/install 115 modules (beginning
> with libxml2).  Is this normal?  Should I expect this to take ages?

Note that "how do I build Gnome" questions are generally more suited
to the gnome-love mailing list.  However, there was an interesting
side-note that I didn't learn at first while working on Metacity, so I
thought I'd allow your post (with a quick answer about the jhbuild
stuff at the end[1]) and provide my follow-up here.

If you have the relevant development libraries (gtk2-devel >= 2.6,
gconf-devel, etc.) already installed on your system, then you can just
checkout, build, and run Metacity without building any other part of
Gnome, like so:

cvs -q -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome \
 checkout metacity
cd metacity
./autogen.sh --prefix /usr
make
./src/metacity --replace

(Note that you don't need to run 'make install'; you can just run it
from the src directory)

Cheers,
Elijah

[1]  Note that jhbuild is designed for building all of Gnome.  When
you tell it to build just Metacity, it knows that Metacity depends on
gtk+ and gconf, which it satisfies by manually building those modules
and all their dependencies.  If you just want your distro's packages
to be used to satisfy dependencies, then jhbuild isn't what you want.