So mysteriously around the same time as John is working on JHBuild for Windows, i’ve set my sights on something a little easier. There is a variant of JHBuild for Debian users wanting packages of SVN versions called JHDebuild. (If you search for it now, you’ll find about twice as much because Google has indexed my tweets and launchpad entries).
I spent a week fighting with JHBuild. It was quite annoying, and I ended up making a script to set up a chroot that I could guarantee /would/compile. But just as I was finishing that I found out about the stuff that Ken was working on. After drooling a little while I decided I wanted to get a few things out of my Debian development environment. I want to be able to easily get a .deb of any GNOME project. And I want to be able to get debs of the whole suite. JHDebuild seemed to fit my needs. Unfortunately its proving more difficult to get going than JHBuild 
So far my patches have been for properties that seem to be missing for some of the repositories and their branch classes. I patched the reprepro support to support more archs. At the moment i’m just trying to get my head around the “get debian/ folder” business – i think i’ve found some duplicate code. Then its back to figuring out why so many packages won’t build. Right now, I think I won’t be able to proceed until I resolve the make dist GNOME Goal…
I’ve set up a branch on launchpad to hold my changes for now, with the hope of pushing most, if not all, back upstream when i’ve gotten things working a bit more.