BSDCan2015 - ZH

BSDCan 2015
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Ryan Lortie
Schedule
Day Talks #1 - 12 June - 2015-06-12
Room DMS 1110
Start time 13:30
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 587
Event type Lecture
Track Hacking
Language used for presentation English
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a stitch in time: jhbuild

staying on top of portability before it becomes a problem

BSD porters have always struggled with portability of software written by Linux users and never tested elsewhere. GNOME has been particularly difficult. New releases would come with new headaches, every six months. By the time the issues were addressed and fixed upstream, a new release would be out with new issues.

In 2014, the FreeBSD GNOME Project changed their approach. jhbuild is now building the full GNOME stack on FreeBSD systems, at least twice daily, directly out of upstream git master. When portability issues creep in, they are addressed immediately — often with patches going upstream the same day. When it comes time to build ports from release tarballs, there are no surprises. A direct result of this effort has been two on-time releases of GNOME (3.12 and 3.14) in FreeBSD and GNOME 3 finally landing in the official ports collection.

This talk will discuss what was done and how it changed the relationship of the FreeBSD and GNOME projects as well as discussing important issues going forward.