Building

Our group has officially switched projects from RapidSMS to Sugarlabs. I've had quite a bit of trouble building and installing, and still haven't gotten anything to actually run.

Carly sent the group this link which was very helpful:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Jhbuild

First, I tried building on the Ubuntu version 10 that I already had installed on my computer. I was confident through the beginning steps. I liked that they had a script for checking required dependencies before the build process. I ran "depscheck" and copied and pasted the names of the missing dependencies into the Synaptic Package Manager to mark them for install before hitting 'apply' to install them. Then I ran the check again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Then, I started the build phase. I received error after error. Upon receiving an error, the build process would stop and show a prompt that looks like this:

*** Error during phase build of python-xklavier: ########## Error running make *** [5/31]

[1] Rerun phase build
[2] Ignore error and continue to install
[3] Give up on module
[4] Start shell
[5] Reload configuration
[6] Go to phase "wipe directory and start over"
[7] Go to phase "configure"
[8] Go to phase "clean"
[9] Go to phase "distclean"
choice:

I tried hitting option 1 to retry the errors, but the result was the same. Above the prompts for the errors it would say that it wanted later versions of dependencies, but the Synaptic Package Manager didn't have those versions. After hitting option 2 multiple times for different modules, I finally reached the end.
It showed a lengthy list of modules that weren't built that looked like this:

*** the following modules were not built *** [31/31]
telepathy-gabble sugar-presence-service sugar-toolkit sugar meta-glucose read terminal log pippy imageviewer turtleart jukebox meta-fructose meta-sugar

Digger deeper into the documentation, I saw that they only support Ubuntu 9.10. I also saw a single command to download all the dependencies; I was mad I didn't see this earlier since I had gone through the trouble of copying and pasting each individual dependency into the package manager earlier. I wanted to keep my later version of Ubuntu installed, so I decided to install Virtual Box in my Windows Vista environment and install Ubuntu 9.10. I tried the dependency command, but it didn't work; I still ended up using the copy/paste method. I went through the build process on this environment and experienced fewer errors, and did not get a list of modules that weren't installed at the end. Hopeful, I tried to run sugar, but it would not run.

There is still more to figure out, but I'm glad I've gotten some of the growing pains out of the way. Two of my group members have had success actually running sugar, so I will talk to them today in class to see if they did anything differently. Perhaps I will have to get rid of my Ubuntu 10 after all.