[Sugar-devel] Simplifying sugar-jhbuild

[NoiseEHC]

Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> Today I've kick-started a newbie on building Sugar to fix a small bug
> and submit his first patch.
>
> It was just painful.  jhbuild has plenty of rough corners and we could
> easily make things easier with a few changes:
>
> 1) Stop checking out random unstable versions of external projects.
> They break very often, and we cannot fix them.  Let's instead upgrade
> manually every once in a while after some testing.
>
> 2) Do not build C modules that is already available (and recent enough)
> in popular distros.  Specifically: abiword, matchbox, hippocanvas...
>
> 3) Let's move etoys away from the base set of components: the repository
> is often offline, building it breaks very often, and it takes a lot of
> time.  You don't need it in order to test Sugar, the same way you don't
> need TamTam and TurtleArt.
>
> 4) We could check for prerequisites before starting the build.  Some
> configure scripts are stupid enough to fail tests silently and proceed
> anyway using "no" as a command name in make :-)
>
> If there's consensus on implementing one or more of these points, I can
> provide patches (or just go on and commit them).
>
>   
When I tried jhbuild what I found strange that it does not detect the 
Linux distro so I had to manually enter commands as it was specified on 
the wiki. Can we get rid of that? (I have no idea how to detect the 
distro or how to automate that just to let you know this fact...)