Building Gnome from tarballs with jhbuild

So, I’ve been meaning to put these steps up online somewhere (besides release-team mailing list archives). I figured my blog was a good temporary place, at least. So, the instructions for gnome-2.12.0 would be:

  1. Make sure you have the necessary pre-requisite packages

    2. http://live.gnome.org/JhbuildDependencies may come in handy here. Note that it is okay to wait until you run into an error and then install the necessary package to avoid it, but it sometimes saves some headache to do it up front.

  2. Download jhbuild (Note: just hit enter when asked for the password)
    3.  $ mkdir -p ~/cvs/gnome2
 $ cd ~/cvs/gnome2
 $ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome login
 Logging in to :pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome
 CVS password: 
 $ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome checkout jhbuild
  3. Install jhbuild
    4.  $ cd jhbuild
 $ make install
  4. Create your ~/.jhbuildrc (or copy it from elsewhere)
    5.  $ cd ~/
 $ wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/teams/releng/2.12.0/sample-tarball.jhbuildrc
 $ mv sample-tarball.jhbuildrc .jhbuildrc
  5. Build it
    6.  $ jhbuild bootstrap
 $ jhbuild -m http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/teams/releng/2.12.0/gnome-2.12.0.modules build

For other versions (greater than or equal to 2.12.0 since we didn’t start saving jhbuild modulesets until then, and didn’t start making them until much before then), just update the URLs accordingly. 🙂 Note that ‘jhbuild -m list -r’ can also be handy for finding out what version numbers occur in a given release.