Working on Evolution code

[David Henningsson]

On 2011-03-20 11:45, Marvin Raaijmakers wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Andreas Rönnquist<gusnan at gusnan.se>  wrote:
>> On Sat, 19 Mar 2011 13:48:09 +0100
>> Marvin Raaijmakers<marvin.nospam at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> I want to work on a solution for bug
>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution/+bug/23810
>>> However I am not sure what is the correct way of working on the code
>>> to eventually make a patch for the evolution package.
>>>
>>> To retrieve the source code I did the following:
>>> apt-get source evolution
>>> dpkg-source -x evolution_2.30.3-1ubuntu7.3.dsc
>>>
>>>  From here on I stuck actually. How can I compile the code to test it
>>> (so I want this without having to install the software)?  I found that
>>> "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b" builds a new package, but this is
>>> not what I want (it also performs a "make clean" so everything will be
>>> recompiled which takes quite some time).
>>>
>>> Or is everything I write wrong and should I checkout the source from
>>> the ubuntu (bazaar?) repository?
>>>
>>> I did not find a document/web-page answering these questions, so I
>>> hope someone here can help me or point to a document that explains
>>> everything. I think I can fix the bug with only a few lines of code,
>>> so I don't want to spend many hours on finding out how to compile the
>>> code to test it.
>>>
>>
>> The debian/rules script does what you want - in your case the command
>>
>> debian/rules build
>>
>> will build the executable. See [1] for more information.
>>
>> [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-debianrules
>>
>> best regards
>> --
>> Andreas Rönnquist<gusnan at gusnan.se>
>>
>>
>> --
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>>
>
> I tried:
>      fakeroot debian/rules clean
> followed by:
>      debian/rules build
> And it looked like everything got compiled. However I cannot find an
> executable named "evolution".

There should be one - perhaps it's named something else or resides deep 
down in a subdirectory?

> Also when I edit a source file and then run "debian/rules build", the
> edited sources file is not being recompiled as I would expect.

Evolution's packaging probably uses a patch system. Run "what-patch" 
(this tool is present in the ubuntu-dev-tools package) to see what patch 
system is used - if it says something like "quilt", "dpatch", etc, you 
need to learn how to use this patch system.

Also, this is an upstream bug - it might make more sense to work 
directly with upstream to try to provide a solution, and then downstream 
it to Ubuntu?

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic