[sugar] A philosophical question

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 23:25 -0500, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
> 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.

One of the key advantages of building from sources is that you can get
the latest revision of things, which in fastly moving environment like
Sugar is at the moment is essential.

If we had to do stable revision of packages then I think it would be
better to just distribute binaries (3 in my list). Probably as a gentoo
user you will disagree with on this one though...

Where I think it would make sense to use stable revisions is for the
base modules (sugar-jhbuild build-base). If someone volunteer to write
and maintain the package list I'd happily include it. I can't maintain
it myself since I need to use head of dependencies too for my
development. 

Marco