[Sugar-devel] Simplifying sugar-jhbuild

[Edward Cherlin]

+1 overall.

The Wiki recommends sugar-jhbuild as an environment for developers.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team

Development systems

All of core Sugar development except system-dependent modifications
can be done on a standard computer by compiling jhbuild and editing
with your favorite editor (eclipse/pydev, emacs, vim, etc.).

Given its dismal record of being able to compile and run, I have not
found that to be the case. I had complete success _once_ over a period
of months.

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> 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.

Yes!

> 2) Do not build C modules that is already available (and recent enough)
> in popular distros.  Specifically: abiword, matchbox, hippocanvas...

Assuming that we aren't building modified versions, of course.

> 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.

And you don't usually need Sugar to test Etoys. Now that we have
numerous functioning images with functioning Activities, this works
for me. Although I would miss TamTam and Turtle Art. Did I mention
that The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose (California) wants to
do an XO exhibit, with a focus on art and music education?

> 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 :-)

Isn't that supposed to be the purpose of './sugar-jhbuild depscheck'?
It doesn't always work, and could be considerably improved with
distribution-specific knowledge.

> If there's consensus on implementing one or more of these points, I can
> provide patches (or just go on and commit them).

Please.

> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
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>



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