Yearly Archives: 2004

jhbuild

Had a pretty good response to the jhbuild changes. There was a number of problems I didn’t catch during my testing (more that I would have liked). However, I think I caught the last few ones with pychecker.

I suppose the next thing to do is to help the fd.org guys set things up so they can manage their module sets from their own CVS tree. That will make it easier to recommend as a build tool.

It is also almost at a stage where it could be packaged as a tarball to be used for building Gnome developer snapshots. (Jeff has said that this might be easier than updating garnome).

Creative Commons

I was looking around on the creative commons website, and came accross this page. Essentially, O’Reilly is planning on licensing their current books under an effective 14 or 28 year copyright (pending author approval).

In addition to that, they say they are planning on releasing their out of print books under an attribution license straight away (again, pending author approval). I was looking over the list of books on the page, and the out of print list included the X series. I have a couple of books from the series, and they have been quite useful.

It looks like they started this a while back and haven’t gotten very far, but it would be very useful once the rest of the X series is available.

Checked in a fairly big set of modifications to jhbuild, designed to make it a bit more modular and the code less messy. I had been working on these changes for a while now, and had been keeping track of them on the jhbuild-ng branch.

Here are a few of the main changes:

Code reorganised into a package

The code has been reorganised into a Python package. Unfortunately this means that the old shell script used to start jhbuild won’t work. Rerunning “make install” will fix this though. This will make it easier to extend things in the future.

AMD64 support

If you are running on an AMD64 Linux machine, the libraries jhbuild builds will end up in ${prefix}/lib64, as they should. If you really want your 64-bit libraries to go in ${prefix}/lib still, you can add “use_lib64 = False” in your config file.

The code is set up to try and set use_lib64 correctly for the machine it is running on. If you find a case where use_lib64 is set incorrectly, please file a bug report.

Unattended build with reporting

Based on a suggestion from someone in the audience at Gnome.conf.au, I implemented a new non-interactive mode that redirects all output to a bunch of files in a directory, along with an HTML page giving a summary of how the build went.

An example of the output can be seen here (generated from a run on an Opteron system). This functionality is available through the jhbuild tinderbox command.

It would be nice to get some of the Gnome companies (eg. Sun) to set up some build boxes running something like this on uncommon hardware to help test Gnome builds.

Build environment sanity check

A jhbuild sanitycheck command. This is intended to be used as a way of checking that the build environment is sane. I plan on changing jhbuild bootstrap to be a script intended for installing all the build tools in the build prefix. This way, if you use the build tools provided by your distro, you can simply run sanitycheck to make sure everything is okay and omit bootstrap.

This command should become more useful as I extend it (most likely in response to bug reports).

Load module sets from web servers

Previously, all the build information in jhbuild was maintained with the code in Gnome CVS. This worked pretty well for building Gnome, since people who were able to check code in that would break the build could also fix the build instructions in jhbuild.

Since then jhbuild has become less Gnome specific, and includes rules for building a number of non-Gnome packages including a lot of stuff from freedesktop.org, such as the X server. Having the build rules stored in Gnome CVS isn’t anywhere near as convenient for them, which was the reason for this new feature.

Now it is possible to specify a full URL as the module set in the config file. Jhbuild will then download the module definition file from the web server and use that. There is code to check whether the modules file has changed if the cached copy is too old too (these checks use various HTTP features to keep the bandwidth usage to a minimum). Hopefully this feature will be useful for other large projects looking for a build tool.

I have tested the code a bit, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if one or two bugs have been introduced. If you find a regression, make sure you report it in bugzilla.

It should now be a lot easier to add new features, which is a good thing.