actually getting builds [LWN.net]

actually getting builds

Posted Sep 26, 2013 10:22 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
In reply to: actually getting builds by torquay
Parent article: GNOME 3.10 Released

GNOME is deeply integrated with your system, and during every release cycle the system integration gets updated as well to provide the features that we depend on.

if you don't mind compiling, then you can use JHBuild to build the entire GNOME moduleset, which is what the release team does whenever they announce a new release of GNOME, as well as what GNOME developers use to actually develop GNOME. this works relatively well for most of the system, but when system dependencies are involved, it breaks down pretty much immediately; yes, you can do feature negotiation, but that doesn't help you if you want to check out the system integration, or hardware-related features, or if the system dependencies change API and are not parallel installable *cough* BlueZ *cough*.

GNOME as a whole is not in the distro business: we sure as hell are not making our own distro, and we try as much as we can to avoid carrying distro-specific hacks; the whole push to use standardised DBus interfaces to talk to the system is to avoid the mess that was the previous system, which relied on ad hoc Perl script that did distro-specific discovery. also, the resources are what they are, so we cannot create an upgradable live image for every distro out there. the Fedora live image comes from Fedora; we used to have an OpenSUSE live image that was created by OpenSUSE people. any effort to create ${INSERT_YOUR_DISTRO_HERE} live images is very much welcome, but it's up to users/developers of said distro to do it.

we do have OSTree, which allows for parallel installable, updatable operating system trees, and which is used to do continuous integration; you cannot install it on bare metal (we don't want to ship firmware, hardware-specific drivers, or security updates) but you can easily test it in a virtual machine. you can use the Boxes application, which makes using and testing virtual machine images really easy.

so, as you can see, there are various ways to get the latest and greatest of GNOME without requiring you to wait for your distribution to update; there are technical reasons why we can't provide you with a reliable parallel installable GNOME-next blob, and those are all pretty much tied to the fact that we're fixing the lower level issues and adding features there, instead of papering over differences with abstraction layers.

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