We are happy to announce that GNOME has been accepted as a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2022!
New contributors will be reaching out in our communication channels for information about the program and to discuss project ideas, please point them to gsoc.gnome.org.
If you have any questions/doubts you can open a topic in our Discourse community, send an email to soc-admins@gnome.org, or reach out in our GSoC Matrix chat room.
It is that time of the year again when we start gathering ideas and mentors for Google Summer Code .
Google Summer of Code 2022 will bring some changes. Our main highlights are:
Please, submit your project ideas as issues in our gitlab repository by March 1st. Make sure you answer all the questions in the issue template (Project-Proposal template).
The GNOME Foundation recognizes that mentoring is a time consuming effort, and for this reason, we will be giving accepted mentors an option to receive the $500 USD stipend that Google pays the organization for each contributor. Mentors can choose to revert the fund into a donation to the GNOME Foundation. Some payment restrictions may apply (please contact us for questions).
Proposals will be reviewed by the GNOME GSoC Admins and posted in our Project Ideas page.
If you have any doubts, please don’t hesitate to contact the GNOME GSoC Admins on this very same forum or on Matrix in the channel #soc:gnome.org
Portals are a mechanism through which applications can interact with the host environment from within a sandbox. They give the ability to interact with data, files, and services without the need to add sandbox permissions.
Examples of capabilities that can be accessed through portals include opening files through a file chooser dialog, or printing. More information about portals can be found in Sandbox Permissions.
Some portals, such as the FileChooser one, provide an almost seamless experience without much extra code on the app side. For other portals, you usually need some code to talk to the portal’s DBus interface or use libportal.
Vala was designed specifically for the development of GNOME apps, and it has some nice syntax-sugar that makes the communication with DBus pretty simple to implement.
GNOME Boxes is written in Vala and, for this reason, instead of consuming libportal, I introduced a small singleton Portal class that centralizes the whole portal communication logic for the app. This turned out to be quite convenient, so I am copy-pasting it in other Vala apps I work on, and sharing this here in case it can be useful to you too. 🙂
This works because in Vala you can define a namespace matching the desired DBus interface name and with annotations, you can bind objects, properties, and methods to a DBus service. See the Vala DBus Client Samples for more examples.
With the Portal singleton, a call to the Background portal requesting permission for the app to run in the background gets as simple as:
var portals = Portals.get_default ();
yield portals.request_to_run_in_background ((response, results) => {
if (response == 0)
// do something...
});
Notice that this is an async call and you may pass a callback to handle its response.
Nothing written here is new, but I thought it was worth sharing this snippet to help others make their apps integrate with xdg-desktop-portals and reduce the unnecessary exposition of user data in sandboxed environments.
This year, motivated by the success of virtual events like GNOME Asia and GNOME Onboard Africa, we decided to organize a GNOME LATAM (virtual) conference. The event was a success, with a nice mix of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking presenters. The recordings are now available and (if you understand Spanish or Portuguese) I highly encourage you to check what the Latin American GNOMies are up to. 🙂
I hope we can make this a tradition and have a GNOME LATAM edition yearly! Thanks a lot to all attendees!
It is that time of the year again when we get to meet our new interns participating in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. This year the GNOME Project is proud to sponsor two Outreachy internships for the May-August season and to mentor 12 students in GSoC 2021!
Our Outreachy projects are listed here, and you can find our GSoC projects here.
Our interns have received an email with instructions for the community bonding period, and you will start seeing their blog posts appearing in Planet GNOME very soon. Make sure you say “hello” and make them feel welcome in our project. Keep in mind that beyond the project’s tasks, we want them to become long-term contributors and, later on, Foundation members. You also will have a chance to get to know about their projects during our Intern Lightning Talks at GUADEC.
If you have any doubt about our participation in these programs, feel free to contact the GNOME GSoC admins or join the #soc channel.
Happy hacking!
It’s that time of the year when we see an influx of students interested in Google Summer of Code.
Some students may need some pointers to where to get started. I would like to ask GNOME contributors to be patient with the student’s questions and help them find where to get started.
Point them at https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/Students for overall information regarding the program and our project proposals. Also, help them find mentors through our communication channels.
Many of us have been Outreachy/GSoC interns and the positive experiences we had with our community were certainly an important factor making us long-term contributors.
If you have any doubts, you can ask them in the #soc channel or contact GNOME GSoC administrators.
Happy hacking!
I’m happy to spread the word that a GNOME event in Spanish and Portuguese is taking place this month, on the 27th of March. It will be a free virtual event with talks and panels where everybody is welcome.
You can register at https://events.gnome.org/event/82/registrations/33/
You can send talk proposals (in Portuguese and Spanish) at https://events.gnome.org/event/82/abstracts/
See you there!
It is that time of the year again when we start gathering ideas for Google Summer Code.
This time around we will be posting and discussing proposals in GNOME’s GitLab instance. Therefore, if you have a project idea that fits Google Summer of Code, please file an issue at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/gsoc-2021/-/issues/new using the “Proposal” template.
Everybody is welcome to add ideas, but it would be nice to verify whether the ideas are realistic and mentorship for it will be available. We encourage you to discuss your ideas with designers in #gnome-design to get their input and plan collaboration, especially if your ideas are related to one of the core GNOME modules.
Keep in mind that there are a few changes in GSoC this year:
If you have any doubts, please don’t hesitate to contact the GNOME GSoC Admins on Discourse or https://chat.gnome.org/channel/outreach
** This is a repost from https://discourse.gnome.org/t/call-for-project-ideas-for-google-summer-of-code-2021/5454 to reach a broader audience. Please share! **
If you are familiar with GNOME Boxes internals you are aware that our secret sauce is libosinfo. It does the OS image detection and provides us with a database of devices, preferences, and compatibility for the operating systems we support.
In the world of traditional package management tools, osinfo-db is the package responsible for delivering updates about new operating system’s releases, fixes, and improvements that Boxes will consume. So whenever you wonder why the newest EndlessOS or the newest Debian release isn’t listed in the Boxes download section, it is likely that osinfo-db is outdated.
The pipeline from upstream -> distros -> to users is extremely valuable for apps and libraries. It is our “integration testing” phase. But for data-only packages like osinfo-db, we noticed that most users’ complains are regarding the package being outdated. We rarely see bugs introduced by osinfo-db updates. The very separation of the dataset (osinfo-db) and the library (libosinfo) is the reason for us to feel confident about contentiously delivering the dataset directly to our users.
For this reason, Flatpak users of GNOME Boxes will now benefit from the OsinfoDb Flatpak extension. It allows us to deliver osinfo-db updates direclty to users without updating the entire Boxes Flatpak. If you are receiving automatic updates in GNOME Software, the osinfo-db update is seamlessly.
Boxes still bundles its own osinfo-db data for those that don’t want to consume the extension. This will be updated whenever the Boxes Flatpak is updated, so expect it in a slower cadence.
Nothing is required from users to transition to this. Flatpak will pull the extension for you once you update Boxes.
This year’s GUADEC was a blast. I miss seeing everybody in person but, at the same time, the online event enabled the participation of many that otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend the conference. I hope we can continue having an online conference alongside our in-person ones, for more people to participate.
During the Intern lightning talks, we had the chance to follow up with the progress of 12 of our 14 GSoC interns and hear from 5 past interns about their experiences after finishing their internships with GNOME.
The past-interns lightning talks session is something I want us to repeat next year. It was a great opportunity for our current interns to inspire themselves with the journey of others that have managed to stay involved with the project. This is extremely important to us because the ultimate goal of having internships is to provide an opportunity for developers to get involved with GNOME long term, becoming the next generation of hackers that will continue pushing our community forward.
Managing a session with 17 different presenters was made easy thanks to Big Blue Button. The recordings are available below.