[maemo-developers] Clean build environment

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Wednesday 08 July 2009 11:38:54 Ed Bartosh wrote:
...
> And the problem is in configure.ac file:
> desktopentrydir=`$PKG_CONFIG osso-af-settings --variable=desktopentrydir`
> serviceentrydir=`$PKG_CONFIG osso-af-settings --variable=dbusservicedir`
>
> If you run pkg-config with these parameters you'll have nothing
> instead of expecting paths.
> It's again about missing build-dependencies. osso-af-settings.pc is
> provided in osso-af-settings package, which is not present in your
> package's build-dependencies.

Great work from Ed to track down the problem with this package.

It highlights that we really need a tool to help developers do builds in a 
clean environment -- and not just do the builds but interact and debug the 
build in the clean environment.

I have such a tool for my own projects (my overnight builds remove and 
recreate a scratchbox target from scratch for each build) but it is tied to 
my personal environment and is also very inefficient (the necessary packages 
get downloaded and installed for each build -- currently three times each 
night!).

Would the autobuilder be a good basis for such a tool?  Or, if not, could we 
create a "standard" scratchbox rootstrap that had the build environment all 
pre-installed and some simple instructions (or scripts) to re-create the 
scratchbox target?

Any better ideas for how developers can test and debug their builds in an 
environment close to the autobuilder environment?

Graham