Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Some questions about setting up the development environment for rhythmbox...

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 03:12:48AM +0530, Seemanta Dutta wrote:
> Hi,
> I want to setup my own development environment for rhythmbox. However I am
> facing a problem because my gnome installation does not have the needed
> version of libgtk and libglib.I am using Intrepid Ibex and the libraries are
> a bit old even after I installed the dev version of the libraries as
> mentioned in the rhythmbox dependency page.

Rhythmbox currently requires gtk+ 2.12 and glib 2.16.  Ubuntu Intrepid appears
to have shipped with gtk+ 2.14 and glib 2.18, so this shouldn't be a problem for you.
Just run 'sudo apt-get build-dep rhythmbox'.
 
> I have never contributed to any open source project before, so the below
> questions might be a bit stupid. But would be grateful to you if you answer
> them nonetheless :-)
> 
> a) If the official ubuntu repositories do not support the libraries that are
> needed for rhythmbox, then what is the solution? Should we download the
> latest libraries ourselves, compile them and then make them available to
> rhythmbox ?

You can do this piece by piece, or you can build everything from (almost) the ground
up using jhbuild (http://live.gnome.org/Jhbuild).  It's probably easier to just
build the libraries you need.  I think at this stage you should only need to build a
newer version of totem-pl-parser, which is a simple standalone library.
 
> b) How does the official maintainer stay on the 'tip' of the code base? Does
> he have his own 'sandbox' with the bleeding edge versions of all the
> dependencies, all built from scratch? Is that way everyone who contributes
> patches to rhythmbox maintains their development environment for rhythmbox ?

Some people do that (using jhbuild, mostly), but we usually try to keep the requirements
such that you can build rhythmbox from git on the latest released version of most
distributions, or on debian sid (which I use).  Much of the time it's possible to
build on even older distributions, but we don't really try to guarantee that.

I mostly just use the debian sid versions of everything, except for GStreamer and
sometimes totem-pl-parser, which I build from git.