Comments on: How bad were GNOME’s CVS build problems during 2.16.x?

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

At one point while

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

At one point while I was still in college, I made a serious attempt to become a GNOME developer (probably around GNOME 2.6 or 2.8). I had quite a bit of programming experience, but I didn’t have much experience with a autoconf. automake, libtool, etc. I was using jhbuild to try to get a CVS version up and running. Over the course of a couple of months, I tried to build GNOME every couple of days — and it was almost never buildable. Sometimes you could find information about what happened on the mailing lists, but the solution was usually just to wait until that particular package was fixed. I remember that gstreamer was going through heavy changes at the time and was almost always broken. Basically, I never figured out how a person was supposed to help develop GNOME. If you skip certain packages, then how reliable is that build? If you can’t get a version working from source, how can you test for repeatability of bugs filed in bugzilla? How can you test any modifications? How do the GNOME develops actually work? Eventually I decided that there were better uses of my time then spending hour after hour trying to figure out why some package all of the sudden won’t build.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

s/GNOME develops/GNOME developers/
s/time then/time than/

By: Fry

Fry — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

When I want to hack on something, I usually get the ubuntu package, its build dependencies, and build it into a custom prefix. Then if I have been productive enough to get a patch I get the CVS module, build that (ubuntu dependencies are usually OK), and re-apply the patch there.

By: Rambokid

Rambokid — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

here’s more evidence for module maintainers being prevented from hacking on their stuff. i’m unable to build gnome up to libgnomecanvas (for which i’m about the only maintainer at this point) for more than a year on my desktop machine now. that’s due to dbus segfaulting when being called for code generation during build of the dbus module. this problem has repeatedly been reported to the dbus maintainers, but all the last emails on the topic simply got silently ignored.

By: Björn Lindqvist

Björn Lindqvist — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Agree 100%! But, disregarding some issues with gnome-doc-utils, GNOME has been very buildable with jhbuild lately. And solutions to most problems can be found from http://live.gnome.org/JhbuildIssues. Ofcourse, this is all thanks to the hard work of hundreds of GNOME developers and testers. Non the less, I’m pretty sure GNOME is much, MUCH more jhbuildable now than it has ever been before.