On 21/07/15 01:11, Owen Taylor wrote:
> As we move to Wayland, some of the ways we used to work on the core parts of 
> GNOME (like gnome-shell --replace) no longer work. I think this is a good 
> time to look at how we hack on GNOME, how we can make it more standard and 
> obvious for newcomers, and how we can make it easier.
>
> We can classify hacking on "GNOME" (taken very widely) into the following:

For my personal case:

>
>  1) Hacking on system components that require hardware access (kernel 
> drivers, NetworkManager)
>  2) Hacking on system components that don't inherently require hardware 
> access (kernel filesystems, systemd, polkit, gdm)

I would add here at-spi2-core too. Although I don't regularly work on
at-spi2-core, usually is enough jhbuild to get it compiling. The tricky
part is get your jhbuild version running instead of the system one. I
usually handle this manually on my own system, without a jhbuild run.

>  3) Hacking on session level components (gnome-session, gnome-shell, 
> gnome-settings-daemon), and the libraries they use (gnome-desktop, clutter)

Hacking on gnome-shell has been increasingly frustrating, at least to
me. In my personal case is because it got more difficult to use at the
same time I needed to compile it less and less. When I was working on
the initial phase of the accessibility support, gnome-shell --replace
was enough. Then I needed to use jhbuild run, and worked most of the
times fine. And at that time, I was working on the shell regularly, so
as Owen mention on a different email, with practice you detect quickly
the weirdness and can keep working. But now, with most of the
gnome-shell accessibility in place, I only build it if I want to check
regressions on gnome-releases, or if any user report a bug. And now
stuff is more complicated. jhbuild replace/run doesn't work or fails
most of the times. As far as I see, there is not a clear and updated
documentation of how to run gnome-shell (so thanks Owen for starting
this thread). So in the end, I just gave up even before trying, even on
bugs that should be easy to fix. Or in other words, there is no way to
work on gnome-shell if you have one hour now and then.

>  4) Hacking on libraries (gtk+)

For atk and at-spi2-atk jhbuild is clearly enough.

>  5) Hacking on applications
>
> Which ones of these do you do? How do you do it? Is 'jhbuild run' sufficient 
> for your needs? Do you log into a jhbuild session? as yourself? as a test 
> user? 

I usually have a test user, and switch between users. At some point this
wasn't an option while working on gnome-shell.


-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro ([email protected])

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