• Changes to Files in GNOME 3.28

  Here are some changes in GNOME 3.28 users will see in the Fedora 28 release.

• Flatpak Linux Application Sandboxing & Distribution Framework Learns New Tricks

  Flatpak, the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, has been updated recently to version 0.11.4, a maintenance update that introduces numerous important changes.

  With Flatpak 0.11.4, the development team updated the "flatpak build" command to allow it to always use multi-arch support, as well as to mount app extensions during the build process. In addition, the "flatpak build-init" command now supports adding of extension points earlier than build-finish by using the --extension argument, and build-finish now supports the --remove-extension argument.

  Updates were also made to the "flatpak uninstall" command, which can now pick the user or system automatically if they're not specified, the "flatpak run" command, which received several new options like --no-a11y-bus and --no-documents-portal. Also, users can now use "flatpak remove" (without quotes) as an alias for the "flatpak uninstall" command.

• Kdenlive sprint news #1

  Part of the Kdenlive team is currently meeting in Paris at the La cité des sciences e de l’industrie to improve the project. We’ve tackled several goals, starting with being together. The magic of this kind of project leads to situations where we work together without meeting each other. Thus, we were able to live, share and especially spend good times to work together in a good mood. It was also useful for making important decisions after rich and lively discussions, exchanging varied points of view related to our respective experiences. Expect big changes very soon. Do you want to know more? Come join us at our new Telegram group!

• Submit your talk for GUADEC!

  GUADEC 2018 is taking place in Almerîa, Spain this year and now is the time to submit your proposals! The submission deadline for talk submissions is tomorrow, on the 29th April.

One interesting usecase of flatpak is as a compliment to the ideas of Fedora Atomic Workstation and similar projects. In other words, a read-only core image for the base operating system, and then using various types of containers and sandboxes for the applications on top of that.

One problem in such a setup is doing development, in that the basic core rarely contains development tools. This is helped a bit by flatpak using runtimes and SDKs, because the compiler used during the build is not from the host. However, flatpaks are typically build using flatpak-builder, which still has some dependencies on the host, such as git/bzr/svn and strip. These pull in a lot of packages that you don’t want on a minimal core OS image.

• Dependencies with code generators got a lot smoother with Meson 0.46.0

  Most dependencies are libraries. Almost all build systems can find dependency libraries from the system using e.g. pkg-config. Some can build dependencies from source. Some, like Meson, can do both and toggle between them transparently. Library dependencies might not be a fully solved problem but we as a community have a fairly good grasp on how to make them work.

  However there are some dependencies where this is not enough. A fairly common case is to have a dependency that has some sort of a source code generator. Examples of this include Protocol Buffers, Qt's moc and glib-mkenums and other tools that come with Glib. The common solution is to look up these binaries from PATH. This works for dependencies that are already installed on the system but fails quite badly when the dependencies are built as subprojects. Bootstrapping is also a bit trickier because you may need to write custom code in the project that provides the executables.

• Expanding Amtk to support GUIs with headerbar

  I initially created the Amtk library to still be able to conveniently create a traditional UI without using deprecated GTK+ APIs, for GNOME LaTeX. But when working on Devhelp (which has a modern UI with a GtkHeaderBar) I noticed that some pieces of information were duplicated in order to create the menus and the GtkShortcutsWindow.

• GLib/GIO async operations and Rust futures + async/await

  Unfortunately I was not able to attend the Rust+GNOME hackfest in Madrid last week, but I could at least spend some of my work time at Centricular on implementing one of the things I wanted to work on during the hackfest. The other one, more closely related to the gnome-class work, will be the topic of a future blog post once I actually have something to show.

• Introducing Chafa

• Infra Hackfest

• Madrid GNOME+Rust Hackfest, part 3 (conclusion)

  I'm back home now, jetlagged but very happy that gnome-class is in a much more advanced a state than it was before the hackfest. I'm very thankful that practically everyone worked on it!

• GNOME loves Rust Hackfest in Madrid

  The last week was the GNOME loves Rust hackfest in Madrid. I was there, only for the first two days, but was a great experience to meet the people working with Rust in GNOME a great community with a lot of talented people.

• GNOME Mutter 3.29.1 Now Works With Elogind, Allows For Wayland On Non-Systemd Distros

  GNOME Mutter 3.29.1 has been released as the first development snapshot of this window manager / compositor in the trek towards GNOME 3.30.

  Mutter 3.29.1 overshot the GNOME 3.29.1 release by one week, but for being a first development release of a new cycle has some pretty interesting changes. Among the work found in Mutter 3.29.1 includes:

  - Mutter can now be built with elogind. That is the systemd-logind as its own standalone package. This in turn allows using Mutter with its native Wayland back-end on Linux distributions using init systems besides systemd.