please make it easier to hack on frameworks

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi,

2013/4/30 Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Tuesday, April 30, 2013 11:20:47 Stephen Kelly wrote:
>
>> I am clueless to understand why building cmake from git and installing it
>
>> into your kf5 prefix is a showstopper. Can you tell me?
>
> Time is limited.
>
> Every repository that I have to build (e.g. cmake) that is not the
> repository I am trying to work on (e.g. plasma-frameworks) is time lost
> getting my tasks done.
>
> Moreover, it is one more thing to learn: where is cmake's git, how to build
> it, etc. For me that is not a big issue (I've build cmake from source many
> times in the past) but for people who might want to work on frameworks this
> kind of thing becomes a show stopper. Eventually they run into so many
> things they have to locate, build and keep up to date that they have no time
> / energy / desire to keep on.
>
> If we want to ensure that it is as difficult as possible to contribute to
> frameworks, congratulations, we're doing a great job of that. If frameworks
> is meant to be a project for you, Kevin, David and Alexander to work on then
> by all means don't worry about this. If the idea is, however, to make it
> attractive to others to work on, then some things need to change.
>
> The idea that it is ok to rely on unreleased software as part of the
> toolchain is one of those things.

but then using a released CMake rather than a recent git snapshot
would not be enough to make building more convenient. We would have to
ensure that the required CMake version is shipped by all major
distros, because I think that downloading released CMake tarballs
every now and then and building them is probably even more
inconvienient than cloning the git repository just once and keeping it
up to date thereafter.

Best regards,
Frank