[Sugar-devel] [sugar-build] Is webkitgtk becoming a barrier?

[lionel at olpc-france.org]

Hi all,

Just to give my feeling about this point. Because my PC is under Windows for
professional reasons, I'm using sugar-build from a VirtualBox VM.
I've recently recreated my sugar-build VM. I choose an Ubuntu 13.04 VM
because no Fedora 18 pre-installed VM is available from now and I have no
time to re installed it from scratch.
In a VM, webkitgtk take more than 3 hours to build, so I must let my
computer powered and wait for the end of the task. It's a long time BTW it's
a one-time only operation. So it doesn't mind.

I think that allowing developers to easily contribute is very important.
Thanks to the current process, it's pretty easy to start your contribution
to Sugar:
- Download a pre-installed Ubuntu 13.04 (this one [1] for example),
- Install GIT using "sudo apt-get install git"
- Follow instructions here: [2]
You're now a new Sugar contributor!
So I'm not favorable to force the use of Fedora 19 that put complexity in
the current process.

Just my two cents.

	Lionel.


[1]
http://184.173.199.227/~jimslice/VMs/Ubuntu/13.04/VirtualBox_-_Ubuntu-13.04-
i386-Desktop-RELEASE-%5BVirtualBoxImages.com%5D.rar 
[2] http://sugarlabs.org/~buildbot/docs/build.html 

------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Mon, 20 May 2013 09:28:15 +0200
From: Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de>
To: sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [sugar-build] Is webkitgtk becoming a
	barrier?
Message-ID: <5199D08F.2060509 at schampijer.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 05/19/2013 01:41 PM, Daniel Narvaez wrote:
> Hey,
>
> It seems like building webkitgtk is a bit of a pain for many people. I
> would like people feedback on how bad of an obstacle it really is and
about
> a couple of possible solutions:
>
> 1 Have buildbot generate snapshots of the base system dependencies which
> most people are unlikely to want to modify anyway and upload those. It
> would probably be a system.img file which you would put in your
sugar-build
> directory. With that file present, the external sugar dependencies would
> not be downloaded and built at all.
>
> 2 Officially support Fedora 19, disable the webkitgtk build there and
> suggest people for which building webkigtk is too much to use Fedora19.

I would go for option (2). Fedora 19 is not that far away [1]. Option 
(1) sounds like a lot of continuous work for supporting and you start 
digging you a hole for a while...

Regards,
    Simon

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/19/Schedule