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Wed, 23 Mar 2011
I have been corralled into doing some programming in python. So at one point I decide to write a do-while loop and learn - python has no do-while loops. Terrific.
My patch made it into Evince 2.91.92, I'm officially a Gnome contributor, yay. I patched a bug while chasing down another bug. Carlos couldn't reproduce it - I wonder when it manifests itself. The bug crept in in December, and not many people are running evince released since then, so the pool to try to reproduce it is limited. Carlos fixed up my patch so that it wouldn't cause problems going in. I still have to fix that original bug. Actually, I already did, but the fix is trivial, and I want to look over my code again to make sure it's decent.
I also patched the evince package for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04. It was a suggested backport of a commit. Again, my patch had to be massaged in. I changed the Ubuntu documentation for patches so as to point to the complete method of doing a patch.
I know people make use of git branches, but I never really used it until recently. It is very handy, especially if you're doing a lot of work on something. I will surely be using it in the future more.
Wed, 03 Nov 2010
Building GNOME with jhbuild, a.k.a. pain
Trivia: Who said less than a month ago, "Getting a jhbuild to finish is next to impossible".
Answer: Benjamin Otte. The #1 commiter to gtk+ in the last 1500 commits or so. The #1 commiter to cairo in the last 500 commits or so.
The problem isn't jhbuild so much, although moduleset options could probably be cleaned up a little bit more. It is with broken stuff in GNOME, or which GNOME depends on. Luckily for me, my build tree is not that large.
Poppler is not alone in my .jhbuildrc in ignoring gobject introspection stuff during a build any more - welcome pango!
Then gtk+ won't build. It was failing on a dependency to fontconfig, which was broken by a commit on October 6th. Or at least fontconfig's pkg-config metadata hint file was broken, for a number of people who use standard build options (like me), causing gtk+ not to build. I've emailed the person who made the commit.
I won't go into stuff higher up on the chain that depends on gtk+. Needless to say there's brokenness.
Wed, 27 Oct 2010
jhbuild, evince/poppler etc.
So, in the GNOME-and-fd.o(freedesktop.org)-verse, there are a few things I
want to run from the latest updates - evince, poppler and cairo. Which
means I want to run the latest versions of their dependencies as well.
So I decided to use jhbuild to build it all. Last
month, GNOME
developer André Klapper wrote
in his blog about how little fun it is to build GNOME from the
latest commits via jhbuild. Perhaps, but I finally did it - a
subset of GNOME anyhow.
The default jhbuild moduleset is gnome-3.0, but that builds some of the stuff I'm focused on from tarball's, which is supposed to be deprecated in jhbuild now anyhow. So I remove gnome-3.0 from my .jhbuildrc and put all of the devel modulesets into my .jhbuildrc. But some of the dependencies were missing - they were in the non-devel modules. So I put all of those into my own moduleset. As my moduleset is local, I set use_local_modulesets to True - even if thats not necessary, I git pull from jhbuild before I run a jhbuild, so why not do that? I also put
module_autogenargs['evince'] = autogenargs \
+ ' --disable-nautilus '
into my .jhbuildrc to avoid those headaches with evince. I skip a
number of modules people recommend to put in skip, like mozilla,
although I don't believe they're dependencies in my chain. I also add a
few pkgconfig path's to .jhbuildrc, on advice from the net. Of
course, I also install the packages on Ubuntu that the jhbuild web site
recommends for Ubuntu 10.10.Incidentally, here are the jhbuild dependencies for evince (and epdfview):
Color code for nodes: green are packages in jhbuild "devel" modulesets, red are packages in jhbuild "non-devel" modulesets, brown (libgcrypt and libgpg-error) are also in jhbuild "non-devel" modulesets and they are tarballs there, purple are packages in jhbuild "devel" modulesets which other packages might have a hidden dependency to which is not shown in the current jhbuild modulesets. Finally blue are non-GNOME packages that no GNOME module is dependent on, but which are themselves dependent on some GNOME modules.
I made the above dependency tree with graphviz, a tool which makes doing such dependency charts really easy.
Everything went pretty swimmingly until I started to reach the top of the chain. Poppler busted on some GObject introspection stuff - I installed gobject-introspection as a jhbuild module and updated the poppler gir include from Gdk-2.0 to Gdk-3.0 and it went sailing along.
Next up - gtk+ 3.0 broke. This happened to me a few days before, when I was taking my first stab at jhbuild. At that time, I looked at the recent gtk+ code, saw the stuff breaking had changed recently, and did a hard git reset of gtk+ to a commit from 48 hours before - it installed fine. This time the commit done was the last one. I went on GNOME's IRC network and tracked down the developer who made the bad commit, he fixed it and I was sailing along again.
So now I get to evince. A few days ago I had some problems with deprecated combo box calls that had been removed from the dependency libraries, but there were patches for that in bugzilla. After patching that, this time I get an error that a set_scroll_adjustments call is failing. I look in gtk+ and see that they have been mucking with scrolling there recently, and figure it is due to that. I disable the call and compile. Evince comes up and I can look around, but it hangs on loading anything.
I check poppler's test programs and they are working. So I encapsulate a lightweight PDF viewer that depends on poppler and gtk+, epdfview, into my personal jhbuild moduleset and build it against these libraries. Epdfview comes up, and displays PDFs etc. fine. Ultimately, epdfview and evince are dependent upon almost entirely the same libraries, except evince depends on three more icon-related ones. And epdfview is working. So either evince is broken, or some library it depends on has changed, meaning... evince is broken, for the moment. But Epdfview works.