New Adventures in JHBuild

7 janvier 2008, 13:50

It has been a long time since the last time I wrote about JHBuild, mostly because I started working on library.gnome.org, then on updating many web sites to the new layout, and out-of-GNOME life, too.

Anyway there have been a flurry of activity last months, and they bring much desired features, some from a long time back (I even got to close a sub-100000 bug report).

From the top of my head and without further ado, here comes a list:

improved GIT support, with support for branches and tags (thanks to GIT assistance from Christophe Fergeau and others on #gnomefr);
support for Monotone, by Gary Kramlich;
support for the WAF build system, by Gustavo J. Carneiro;
added different policies so JHBuild will rebuild all modules (old and default behaviour), will rebuild all modules that have been updated, or will rebuild all modules that have been updated or with a rebuilt dependency;
added a nopoison mode so failures are ignored (useful since today failure was yesterday success, hopefully), and a try-checkout mode so failures will force checkout and autogen steps;
made the <tarball> module type a thin wrapper around both the autotools module type and the tarball version control type (1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 242 deletions(-), happy maintainer);
support for a "quiet" mode, going hand in hand with a progress bar:
```
[==============-------------] [ 6/12] Checking out gnome-panel
```

I also added two tasks to the GHOP and Cillian64 got to task and he first updated the DTD to match current elements and attributes of module sets and is now working on updating the JHBuild documentation, which means it will get nice and shiny and uploaded to be available on library.gnome.org.

Last but not least there have been work by John Stowers of Conduit fame to get JHBuild useful on the Windows platform, some patches were applied but there is some disagreement on the addition of a binary module type; so I welcome anybody motivated enough to get things compiled and installed through JHBuild on Windows. In the same vain, people interested in using JHBuild for crosscompiling are encouraged to work on it.

And an happy new year to all GNOMErs! And congrats to the KDE team, I hope all goes well for them too.

Update: I missed the no-poison and try-checkout modes even though they were the sub-100000 bug I wrote earlier and are so useful.