[sugar] A philosophical question

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
...
> I think the two options we have considered so far are the following.
>
> 1 Build from sources
>
> This is what sugar-jhbuild currently does, some facts about it:
>
> * I'm convinced it will be the primary development environment until the
> platform stabilize, which will not be too soon.
> * We need to decrease the number of packages we build and to make the
> build more reliable for the packages we own (i.e. be careful to not
> break the build). When FC 7 and equivalent distributions will be release
> I hope we will be able to skip building the base.
> * It will never be a completely reliable environment, that's the nature
> of compiling from sources.
>   
Um, speaking as a Gentoo user, that's last bullet is a strange 
statement.  The problem seems to be that you guys seem to be building 
from *head* on some huge number of projects (I say seem to be because I 
just wound up having to give up trying to get sugar installed due to 
broken builds).  That would require very high discipline on all of the 
projects to make it work.

If you had your build environment use a tag/revision in the source 
control system for each project and only update the version used when 
your core developers *know* that the new version has built and run on a 
couple of dozen boxes you'd have a far greater chance of getting new 
developers built without problems.  In short, you'd have a testing tag 
and a stable tag for each component.

Someone who just wants to use the environment (i.e. almost *all* new 
developers) could then build the stable tags, someone who wants to work 
with the latest and greatest could use the testing tags and contribute 
to the testing of them by their building.  When everyone is building 
head in all these projects, by contrast, you are basically having every 
new developer build a different piece of software, with no idea whether 
what they are building is actually usable.  Given that new developers 
are *new*, and thus unlikely to know whether they are seeing a failure 
in their usage or the code itself, knowing that what they are trying to 
do is *possible* is a great help for them.

Sure, someone might get code that's 2 or 3 weeks out of date, but if 
they are working on a particular module, they'd set their tag to "HEAD" 
for that piece and be on the bleeding edge for that piece.

Just my $0.02,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com