I recently started looking at some GStreamer & Wayland integration issues and, as everyone would, commenced by trying to setup a Wayland development environment.
Before getting my feet wet though, I decided to have a chat about this with Derek Forman, OSG's resident Wayland expert. This isn't surprising because on our team, pretty much every task starts by having a conversation with one of our field specialists. The idea is to save time, as you might have guessed.
This time around I was looking for a fairly trivial piece of info:
Me - "Hey Derek, I have Wayland installed on my distro for some reason - I don't really want to take a look at now - and I would like to setup an upstream Wayland environment without messing it up. Do you have some script like GStreamer's gst-uninstalled so I can perform this feat without messing with my local install?
Derek - "Hey Reynaldo, No."
He said something else I forgot already. Guess he was ranting as usual. Anyhow, the conversation continued with me taking care of the usual I-forgot-to-ask-how-you-were-doings, and later, I'm not sure who's idea it was but we decided to try upstreaming a
wl_uninstalled script --The name had to match existing infrastructure, but that's a boring story you don't want to know about-- that, like gst-uninstalled, would enable developers to quickly setup and use a build/run-time environment consisting of an uninstalled set of interdependent Wayland repos. The idea is not new, but it's still extremely useful. Sure, you can perform similar feats by littering your local disk with custom-prefix installs of pretty much anything, but hey, it is bad taste OK? and you will waste a lot of time, at the very least once.
As if the foreword wasn't boring enough and to continue trying your resilience, here are the instructions to use the thing we come up with:
First the What
Essentially, wl_uninstalled is a helper script that automates the setup needed to build and work with an uninstalled Wayland/Weston environment comprised at least of the wayland, wayland-protocols, libinput, and weston repositories. The provides a shell environment where all build and run-time dependencies are resolved so the uninstalled versions of these modules take precedence.
Then the How
I'll use Weston as an example although other Wayland-based projects should work as well.
Edit a local copy of the script to make $WLD point to the base directory where the repositories are located, make sure to use the absolute path. Then, after executing the script, issue the following commands to get everything built and Weston running from the uninstalled environment:
cd $WLD for i in wayland wayland-protocols libinput weston; do cd $i && ./autogen.sh && make && cd ..; done weston &
This work is now upstream, you can see the discussions by searching for 'uninstalled' in the Wayland mailing lists archive. As an added bonus, it turned out that fiddling with this uninstalled environment mambo-jambo lead to the uncovering of a few additional broken pieces of buildsystem/pkg-config cruft that we fixed too. 'Cause we are good as that see ;). Not everything has been merged though. A word on that at the end.
Back to my own use case --GStreamer / Wayland integration work-- now I can simply call the wl_uninstalled script before gst-uninstalled and I'm all set. My uninstalled GStreamer environment will use my (in-turn) uninstalled Wayland/Weston environment making debugging, fixing and integrating against the upstream version of both projects a breeze --Not really but still--, and my filesystem more FHS-compliant. But then again, who cares about that; you probably just want all this to be quick and painless. Hopeless.
Note:
While all patches for this are on Wayland's public mailing list, some have not been merged yet. If you want to try the procedure described here you will need to manually apply the missing ones till they find their way into the official repository:
The actual script is in the wayland-build-tools repository now.
