[sugar] Development environment for newcomers

[Mike C. Fletcher]

drew einhorn wrote:
...
> I agree that sugar-jhbuild is not suitable for beginners to
> install on their computers.  In addition to taking way too
> long to compile (on an average box) and download
> (if you are bandwidth deprived, like me), it is way to unstable
> for beginners.  Something that worked yesterday may not
> work today, once the latest source with new bugs is
> retrieved by subversion or git.
One of the possible partial solutions we identified was to fix jhbuild 
to allow for date-based git checkouts (Ian has submitted a patch) and 
then publish a "known to work" date, so that developers could tell 
sugar-jhbuild to build for the known-good date.  Once a developer has a 
built version of sugar and all the dependencies they can keep up-to-date 
by skipping the broken packages on the next build (normally).  The 
developer's image should allow this working method as well, so 
developers can keep their images up-to-date the same way the core 
developers are.

Regarding stability: the developer's image is currently using Gentoo's 
portage system for the build-base stuff.  Gentoo is pretty good about 
stability on packages and provides fairly reliable upgrading, despite 
having very up-to-date packages available.  Because there's only 24 
packages using sugar-jhbuild there should be less breakage than with the 
205 packages in a build-base installation.

> to access the gui over a low bandwidth link.
This is probably the biggest limitation of the developer's image 
approach.  It really doesn't work well over a low-bandwidth link, unless 
you use a DVD with the image (and the players for Linux and Win32) 
burned onto it.
>      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS
I'm not enough a sysadmin to know whether the approach is a good one.  
I'd rather not have to maintain a central server with hundreds of users 
(I'm not a sysadmin by trade, after all), but maybe that's no biggie for 
some people.
> Guido has been frustrated trying to get sugar-jhbuild running on
> his Ubuntu Dapper box, and kicked off a discussion about what
> OS would be best if he decides to build a new box to use
> for sugar development.  We should pay attention to that thread.
> I have not yet looked to see if he has gotten any responses.
> I think Ubuntu Edgy, Feisty, and Fedora Core 6 will be in the
> running.  I have no idea if any of them support a unionfs.
...

IIRC we failed on Edgy using the system libraries approach as well.  So 
you may need to do a build-base install on that.  Feisty was the 
platform suggested to us at the end of that attempt for a 
system-libraries approach.

UnionFS v2 is apparently available for the 2.6.20 and above kernel. 
(from http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html)

Have fun,
Mike

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