Some GNOME websites are getting modernized and simplified, but Planet GNOME has fallen behind. Not anymore. I started a prototype for a Python script to publish Planet GNOME with GitLab Pages/CI.
As Planet GNOME Editor, I am often asked to look for blog and syndication issues I couldn’t really address due to limited server-side access. With this, debugging indexing issues should be easier as it is just about looking at the CI job output.
Also, the Planet website is perceived as messy and outdated. So this work allowed Jakub Steiner to quickly jump in and restyle the page from a clean state.
This still doesn’t produce the global Planet rss feed, just the webpage, but that’s in my TODO list too.
P.S.: I know feed readers/parsers can over-request rss/atom feeds. So I plan to cache data and use metadata to avoid redundant downloads before this is even considered as a replacement for the current Planet implementation. No worries. 😉
GNOME yearly participates in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. These internship programs basically consist on having new contributors working on a well-scoped project alongside an experienced mentor.
Defining project ideas is not as easy as it might sound. One needs to consider the perspective of a newcomer approaching the project for the first time, having a schedule where they are expected to onboard, work, and produce contributions that benefit the project.
Instead of my yearly call for project ideas, I would like us to maintain a permanent collection of project ideas that can be discussed and iterated over for a longer period of time. Sometimes an idea can depend on prior work, some UI mockup, or the availability of someone to mentor.
The Internship Project Ideas GitLab repository is now the place for these conversations to take place. The repository’s issue tracker should work well for cross-linking to issues in the repository of our components, as well as allow for tagging individuals that can provide valuable input on the composition of a project idea.
Both internship programs allow for the applicants to propose their very own project ideas, so whenever you get contacted by a potential future intern, ask them to file an issue on our Internship Project Ideas repository for further discussions.
Lastly, Don’t Be That Person: Don’t propose projects that neither you nor anyone else wants to mentor. 😉
It is been a long time coming, but I finally decided to take a moment to summarize the Boxes happenings in the last six months. And a lot has happened!
Firstly, I haven’t stated in this blog that I am maintaining Boxes for the last couple of releases. It’s been an exciting learning journey and I cannot thank Zeeshan Ali enough for paving the way for me.
3.28 has many internal changes and enhancements worth enumerating, therefore I am going to highlight the most relevant ones IMO.
Distro hoping was my hobby back in the days when distros were really different from each other. I feel that this is somehow coming back now with new players targeting the desktop market, such as Endless OS and Pop!_OS.
Boxes intents to make it easy for people to try new operating systems from the comfort of their current system. Whether you want to explore, run something in a contained environment, perform something risky and easily recover your installation, Boxes wants to make it simple.
Libgd was an experimental ground for us to introduce many widgets, including our re-sizable icon views with their selection-mode and convenient API. Boxes no longer needs libgd for that since Gtk+ has been evolving along the years and more modern widgets have been gradually introduced.
We ported the notifications from GdNotifications to GtkRevealer, and now the content views are GtkFlowBox and GtkListBox.
Visually it should look no different to the end-user, but for developers it means a significant code simplification.
The migration to GitLab is another bit that shouldn’t make a difference from an end-user point of view, but is indeed a big deal for everyone involved in development.
The word is that nobody ever wrote autotools files from the scratch, ever, but copied from an existing working project and tweaked it. I am no different. My understanding of autotools has been always superficial despite trying to learn it a few times.
No disrespect for those who came before. I acknowledge the needs of ancient times and I wouldn’t bash more something that’s so far from my domain.
The learning curve for Meson made me finally have the motivation to understand build systems. The cleanness of syntax and file structure is definitely medicine for my organizational obsession.
Special thanks to Iñigo MartÃnez for his dedication to help porting many of our components to Meson.
Handle mime-types
Yep yep, double click on an image/iso file and install!
That’s All Folks!
Many bugfixes landed in this cycle, so I encourage you to check it out.
GNOME Boxes 3.28 is the resulting work of 57 contributors!
