[maemo-developers] Clean build environment

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Wednesday 15 July 2009 23:21:26 Ed Bartosh wrote:
> It would be also good to explain debugging in a bit more detailed way,
> with some example maybe. It's not clear what to do exactly when build
> fails.

Yes, I thought I might include a worked example of finding and fixing a 
missing build dependency or something.  But I'm not going to get a chance to 
that for the time being.

> It also makes sense to propose additional features for sbdmock. After
> reading your wiki page I can propose at least one - sbdmock shouldn't
> delete target and clean up working directory when build fails. May be
> it should work only with --debug. It would simplify debugging a lot,
> as far as I can see.

I have already proposed a couple of new features for sbdmock (with proposed 
patches) -- see the Issues.

I don't think it is a good idea to **ever** leave a "uniqueid" (i.e. -u) 
target lying around -- that will cause targets to proliferate (targets in 
Freemantle seem to take up a lot of space -- over 1GB each!).  And the user 
does not know the target name to be using or to remove once they have fixed 
the problem.

Better, I think, is for the user to be able to use a particular named target 
for test builds and have it stay around for debugging.  That means that the 
named target must be completely initialised when it is cleaned, so it works 
the same way as the autobuilder.  So, I have proposed a change where the 
cleaning process always completely removes the specified target and recreates 
it from scratch (use --no-clean if you don't want that behaviour).  If that 
change is implemented, I will change the "test build" recommendation on the 
wiki page to no longer use -u but to use either a named target or just the 
default from the config file.

If anyone has an alternative proposal please either comment here or comment on 
the Issue I entered on the sbdmock site.

Graham