[sugar] Development environment for newcomers
Mike C. Fletcher
mcfletch at vrplumber.com
Mon Mar 12 00:50:15 EDT 2007
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
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