[Kde-scm-interest] JhBuild

[Matt Williams]

On 28 January 2010 14:59, Ian Monroe <ian.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:51 AM, John Tapsell <johnflux at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>>  I just joined the mailing, just to advocate using JhBuild when
>> moving to git.  This is a tool a bit like kdesvn-build that handles
>> the dependencies between the git modules.
>>
>> Reason
>>
>> 1) Gnome and Xorg use it.  Using it would mean that the three big
>> projects would all be using the same system.  This is just an awesome
>> concept!
>> 2) It can handle cmake just fine.
>> 3) It's just feels "transparent" and doesn't get in the way.  It
>> doesn't hide compiler messages or anything, and it becomes normal to
>> just use jhbuild to build even normally.
>> 4) It just works.  Our build instructions for users would reduce to
>> something like:
>>        sudo apt-get install jhbuild;
>>        wget http://kde.org/kde.jhbuild;
>>        kate kde.jhbuild  (tinker to set where you want it to install)
>>        jhbuild -f kde.jhbuild kdebase
>> 5) Did I mention that it works transparently?  It just doesn't get in the way.
>
> I've moved away from the idea of blessing a build tool. Instead we
> could have a officialish KDE-specific simple clone tool that did
> nothing but checkout extragear/multimedia etc. Handy for people who
> don't want to use a build tool and it would establish a canonical
> layout of different projects.

One of the oft-quoted selling points of git is the separation of
backend and porcelain and so a kde-specific git command to provide
functionality similar to the bazaar 'lp:' type meta-URLs could be
useful. To do something like:

git clone kde:kdelibs # or
git kdeclone kdelibs

which, inside its workings could contain/lookup the official KDE
module dependencies/relationships.

> That said, the community deciding to use the same build tool as Gnome
> and X.org would make a lot of sense.

My only concern is abstracting away what's happening underneath too
much but I agree this is a selling point.

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com