[maemo-developers] Clean build environment

[From: Ed Bartosh]

2009/7/8 Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net>:
> 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?
>
There is such a tool and autobuilder is uses it.
It's called sbdmock and you can find it here:
http://github.com/kad/sbdmock/tree/master

To build the package the same way as autobuilder does you just need to
run 'sbdmock -r <target> -u <your .dsc file>'
where target is the name of sbdmock target and -u option is for
creating new scratchbox target for the build, AFAIK.

You can find Chinook target configs here:
http://github.com/kad/sbdmock/tree/186e27cacd6149170df456007f98ddb646dc980a/etc

And I can put Diablo and Fremantle configs somewhere if needed.

-- 
BR,
Ed