Building, Packaging, and Distributing GNOME
The most important consideration when building software for distribution is compatibility. When you build packages, care needs to be taken to link against the proper libraries on the target platform. To do this reliably, you really need the right tools. With Foresight Linux, I chose conary, rMake, and rBuilder to enable building, testing, and distribution of GNOME.
Conary is more than just a package manager, it also has a built in source management system. Similar to say cvs, svn, mercurial, bzr, etc. The difference is the sources are directly associated with the package in the repository. rMake is a build system that takes advantage of this technology and adds the abilty to create pristine, repeatable builds. This is done by building in a chroot and committing built packages to a separate branch.
During this talk, I will dive a bit into this technology and talk about how I use it to automate building regular builds of GNOME. This talk will also explain how this can be used to enable multiple maintainers to work together, automation, and managing the release process.