Nightly builds?

[Rémi Cardona]

Le 06/11/2009 08:48, Tormod Volden a écrit :
>> 1. Nightly builds. Did wonders for Mozilla. Binary of main supported
>> architectures (linux/i386, opensolaris, whatever someone will be able
>> to commit to build nightly). Download and run. Report bugs.

Xorg is not your standard application. In nearly all distros, X is 
configured differently, with different paths, etc. So even if we did do 
binary builds, it would be much harder for users to actually "download 
and run".

And now that X drivers are being trimmed down in favor of kernel 
drivers, that only makes things more complex.

> For Ubuntu there is the xorg-edgers PPA (personal package archive)
> which have done exactly this for years:
> https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers

In Gentoo, we have the x11 overlay which provides "live" packages. 
Whenever the user builds one of our "live" packages, the code is fetched 
from git and completely rebuilt. And with a single command, users can 
rebuild all "live" packages.

As far as testing is concerned, both our approaches are extremely easy 
for end-users and completely integrated with the distro's package manager.

>> 2. Make the source build easier, so people will build and run it from
>> source for the more obscure platforms.

My answer to that would be build.sh or jhbuild. All the info is written 
down in the wiki [1].

Sure it could probably be easier, but it's not like there's nothing at 
all. But building from source _is_ tricky and you have to have some 
prior knowledge before building large source trees like Xorg.

Cheers,

Rémi