TIL: jhbuild update

I’ve often lamented the fact that jhbuild is dumb about the way that it does download, build, download, build, download, build. It totally misses the chance to download ahead of time so that it never has to stop building.

I just discovered “jhbuild update”, which will download everything ahead of time.

Of course, you can start “jhbuild update” and let it grab the first few packages and then “jhbuild build” in another terminal. As long as they don’t step on each others’ feet, that should speed things up a lot…

TIL.

a warning about glib

I just wrote an email to the gtk-devel-list with an update on the potentially-dangerous work that has gone into GLib since the Boston Summit (where we planned quite a lot of changes).

One item in particular needs to be mentioned.

A few moments ago I just landed a relatively small patch that refuses attempts to add an interface to a class that has already been initialised (which usually occurs at first instantiation), emitting a g_warning() instead.

This functionality was used in a dirty way by pygobject until earlier today when Martin landed a rewritten version of the code. libsoup also made theoretical use of this feature, although it’s unclear if the code in question was ever executed in the real world (and is certainly never used by any module in jhbuild).

The new warning looks something like this:

(process:30660): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: attempting to add an interface (TestIface1) to class (BaseObject) after class_init

The main upshot of this is that if you are building glib in jhbuild and you fail to also build the new pygobject then you may encounter problems. If you are making packages for a distribution then you should also take care to make sure that you manage the upgrades to glib and pygobject in lock-step.

The patch was written in a way that is intentionally minimal and easy to back out. At this point we’re playing wait-and-see to find out if other modules are broken by this change. If you spot any other instances of this warning in the wild (apart from those mentioned above), please let me know.