On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 01:17:12AM +0100, Alex Valavanis wrote:
@Bryce - I still think git submodules are a good idea; there's nothing intrinsically difficult from a developer's perspective after initial config, and this fix in LP should allow us to run PPA builds. Anything we can do to minimise unnecessary forks of upstream library code sounds like a good thing to me! For safety, we can just add tests to the CMake scripts to allow a feature-incomplete build if the submodules have failed to pull for whatever reason.
I'm sure submodules can work fine, but the procedures for casual builders are not well documented. A couple of years ago, maybe more, my own build scripts started doing the wrong thing while building one of the main gnu packages (during fresh builds of linuxfromscratch).
I eventually found, by trial and error, that there was a namespace clash betwween an environment variable I was using, and something which had been added to that package. But before that I had tried git bisect between the current release and the previous release to try to find which commit broke it for me. Unfortunately it pulled in gnulib and I never really managed to get a version of that which was appropriate to the package's version I was trying to build - leading to compilation failures.
That problem was specific to my scripts, but I'm sure that from time to time every package which pulls in external git trees will offer similar fun and games.
So, if inkscape is going to use submodules, I hope the process for anybody who needs to bisect (to find where a problem was introduced) will be documented.
ĸen