Re: Proposal to make GnomeLove official and move it to developer.gnome.org

On 20/03/15 14:49, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> <snip>
> I think the main thing missing from GnomeLove/BuildGnome is a big
> warning not to use --nodeps or 'jhbuild buildone' before 'jhbuild
> build'... it's incredible how many helpless users we have on IRC who
> don't realize that you need to build dependencies.

*Sigh*... the difference between build and buildone comes up again.

I've always been concerned about this.

I even raised a bug to improve the situation (but from some points of 
view, doing that could be even worse... see the bug for more info):
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/711773

So I'm now wondering: there should be just one command instead of two, 
that is smart enough to know what to do best, that is, best of both 
worlds, which means: only build the dependency if the distro is not 
providing a high-enough version.

I know this problem is hard, but is doable, and would avoid this 
confusing documentation mess and allow a much lower barrier of entry for 
newcomers.

Technically, under the hood, I guess we would need a way of declarating 
dependencies, by upstream projects, in certain file format (i.e. JSON) 
instead of M4 like it's usually done now, so that jhbuild can parse it. 
Then we would need a way to query versions in package repositories in a 
cross-distro way. Then "...". Then PROFIT.

Hope my 2c helps,
   Andres

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