Building Gnome (Default) applications

Hello Gnome Friends,

I had a query.

Situation:
Whenever anyone wants to build any Gnome application like the new Notepad or Settings or GJS then the process starts with setting up the build environment and installing the required lib files, etc.
I am sure that every new contributor spends time on this.

Is it possible to create a build environment, something like a container/Gnome OS image for the applications where contributors can directly download nightly build environments/Gnome OS image and start building and testing the applications without spending time on the setup?

This will be very very helpful to all contributors, new as well as experienced I feel. Also when a potential contributor has only one laptop for daily work and trying to contribute to gnome then a container will help a lot. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

Thank you.

Ideally it can be solved by BuildStream. That is its purpose at least. But in practice it’s not yet a great development environment, some commands are too slow. Normally BuildStream 2 is better in that regard.

Yes, that’s what Flatpak and GNOME Builder do—for most applications. That’s why most GNOME applications have a Flatpak manifest to begin with. You can run GNOME Builder, clone an application from the list:

and you can start building and working on it pretty much immediately. That’s the whole Newcomers guide in a nutshell.

For some applications, mainly the ones that interface with system services like GNOME Settings or for system components, like GTK or GNOME Shell, this isn’t really possible to do. You need a fairly bleeding edge system. For that, you may want to download GNOME OS, and then switch to the development branch using:

sudo ostree admin switch gnome-os:gnome-os/master/x86_64-devel

in your VM; at that point, you’ll be able to write code on top of the GNOME OS base.

Development of system components is not a trivial task; nobody has actually found a way to make it easier, and a people working on the middle and lower layers of the stack typically have their own personal solutions.

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@ebassi Thanks a lot I was able to build the new Text Editor with the method you mentioned. :smiley:

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