GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 779915
Revert "Require Vala 0.35.7"
Last modified: 2017-03-11 20:29:06 UTC
I don't think a change like this should be made this late in GNOME's release cycle if it causes problems for distros. Ubuntu 17.04 is shipping as much GNOME 3.24 as possible. Ubuntu 17.04 is sticking with vala 0.34 because vala 0.36 has stricter syntax requirements which causes many non-GNOME packages to fail to build. I intend to upload vala 0.36 to Ubuntu when 17.10 development begins, when there is time to fix these build failures. After reverting this commit, I built gnome-chess 3.23.92 and it seemed to run successfully. I lost because computers always beat me at chess.
Created attachment 347721 [details] [review] Revert "Require Vala 0.35.7" This reverts commit 97e44ab2a5f281f80e11cecbbfc012a51cc75d3a.
Created attachment 347722 [details] build log Here's a log of a 3.23.92 build from before I reverted the commit. Why doesn't the configure.ac valac check stop the build? My valac version is only 0.34.6.
Oh, I guess it's because valac isn't strictly required to build GNOME tarballs, but we try to build from the vala source in Debian anyway. checking for valac... /usr/bin/valac checking whether /usr/bin/valac is at least version 0.35.7... no configure: WARNING: no proper vala compiler found configure: WARNING: you will not be able to compile vala source files
(In reply to Jeremy Bicha from comment #3) > Oh, I guess it's because valac isn't strictly required to build GNOME > tarballs, but we try to build from the vala source in Debian anyway. Yup. You should not even need vala to build, for one. For another, vala has always been unstable and building with a version of vala that does not correspond to the desired GNOME release has never really been supported. You can just as well carry the patch downstream if that's what you (understandably) want to do. Although I think it's great that you're trying to get as much of GNOME 3.24 as possible, we have never supported version mix-and-match and never will. Sorry!
Um, this feels like a Freeze break to me. And it looks unnecessary. Why did you commit this? Nothing else in GNOME 3.24 requires vala 0.36.
Is requiring vala 0.36 technically a Freeze Break? Maybe not. But Ubuntu is at the mercy of GNOME's Freeze policy and interpretation. I must upload the new GNOME by Ubuntu's Feature Freeze, or else it seems rather unlikely that I will get approval from Ubuntu's Release Team afterwards. Ubuntu's Feature Freeze is immediately after the .90 release and The Freeze. [1] This runs the risk of GNOME breaking (or "fixing") something after The Freeze and not considering the problems that late changes could cause. And then Ubuntu is stuck on a .90 snapshot. I think the fix here is simple. Branch for 3.24 and apply this revert to 3.24. That way you don't have to worry about dropping the conditional later. I have zero problem with GNOME 3.26 requiring vala 0.36. By doing that, I feel it would show more respect for distros. And I think that one reason we have a Freeze is for distros. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZestyZapus/ReleaseSchedule Ubuntu 17.04 Feature Freeze was announced 8 minutes after GNOME 3.23.90 was announced. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2017-February/msg00001.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2017-February/001202.html