To me, the criterion for success is that someone can start from scratch, without knowing much about Linux development and have a working build within an hour or so, without having to babysit it. Any sort of babysitting makes things much longer for everybody, and basically impossible for the novice.
Here are notes from trying a pretty much from-scratch build of meta-gnome-core-shell. (I made an effort to remove as many development packages as possible from my system before doing this.) * I'm a bit skeptical of the existence of meta-gnome-core-shell, which, as I understand it, is supposed to contain the set of things that need to be built for gnome-shell to work at runtime - so, e.g., dconf is just a run-time dependency, since the build-time depdendency is just gsettings. But what if I wanted to hack on nautilus or gnome-control-center rather than gnome-shell? Shouldn't we shoot for: jhbuild build <X> jhbuild run <X> working? * I think we need to work on our setup process; if you get jhbuild installed, typing jhbuild produces: jhbuild: could not load config file, /home/otaylor/.jhbuildrc is missing With no help about how to create it. You have figure out to go to the jhbuild source tree and copy sample.jhbuildrc into the right place. Shouldn't we offer to create a .jhbuildrc if it doesn't exist or alternatively, just run without one? * The defaults for checkout and installation directory are: checkout - ~/checkout/gnome install - /opt/gnome these seem rather random and incoherent to me. Is there a reason to do the install into a system directory by default? * Before I even tried to build, I ran a modified version of the gnome-shell build-setup script to install a number of system dependencies that I knew would cause failures. This made sure that the following packages were installed (on Fedora) binutils curl gcc gcc-c++ make automake bison flex gettext git gperf libtool pkgconfig jasper-devel libffi-devellibjpeg-devel libpng-devel libtiff-devel mesa-libGL-devel pam-devel python-devel readline-devel libXdamage-devel icon-naming-utils libtool-ltdl-devel libvorbis-devel libusb1-devel cups-devel db4-devel sane-backends-devel xcb-util-devel * I then ran jhbuild sysdeps. When you just run jhbuild sysdeps and it displays a report, it really should make it clear that by running 'jhbuild sysdeps --install' it can install these system dependencies. It installed: libpulse dbus-1 nspr cairo dbus-glib-1 unique-3.0 mozjs185 webkitgtk-3.0 libnl-1 libproxy-1.0 sqlite3 libxslt nss libdaemon libxml-2.0 * I still was missing quite a few packages needed for a successful build. Things I needed to install were: libffi-devel (glib) texinfo (libIDL) libcurl-devel (liboauth) openssl-devel (liboauth) libacl-devel (gudev) libudev-devel (gudev) libicu-devel (webkit) libXt-devel (webkit) libgdbm-devel (avahi) udisks-devel (gnome-disk-utility) wireless-tools-devel (NetworkManager) libuuid-devel (NetworkManager) ppp-devel (NetworkManager) libXtst-devel (mousetweaks) * 99 modules *** Checking out gnome-common *** [1/99] (~44 for gnome-shell. 66 in main moduleset if I just list gnome-shell) * Stuff I had to add * #!$!@ update conflict in gdk-pixbuf * http://live.gnome.org/Jhbuild Is far too detailed and text-y, and "you can do this or you can do that" And probably should not recommend bootstrap under any circumstances * Problems with result - Ugly cursors - Couldn't connect to GVC - Doesn't seem to be picking up appointments _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list