Tag Archives: Berlin

Mini-GUADEC 2022 Berlin: retrospective

I’m really pleased with how the mini-GUADEC in Berlin turned out. We had a really productive conference, with various collaborations speeding up progress on Files, display colour handling, Shell, adaptive apps, and a host of other things. We watched and gave talks, and that seemed to work really well. The conference ran from 15:00 to 22:00 in Berlin time, and breaks in the schedule matched when people got hungry in Berlin, so I’d say the timings worked nicely. It helped to be in a city where things are open late.

c-base provided us with a cool inside space, a nice outdoor seating area next to the river, reliable internet, quality A/V equipment and support for using it, and a big beamer for watching talks. They also had a bar open later in the day, and there were several food options nearby.

At least from our end, GUADEC 2022 managed to be an effective hybrid conference. Hopefully people in Guadalajara had a similarly good experience?

Tobias and I spent a productive half a day working through a load of UI papercuts in GNOME Software, closing a number of open issues, including some where we’d failed to make progress for months. The benefits of in-person discussion!

Sadly despite organising the mini-GUADEC, Sonny couldn’t join us due to catching COVID. So far it looks like others avoided getting ill.

Travel

Allan wrote up how he got to Berlin, for general reference and posterity, so I should do the same.

I took the train from north-west England to London one evening and stayed the night with friends in London. This would normally have worked fine, but that was the second-hottest day of the heatwave, and the UK’s rails aren’t designed for air temperatures above 30°C. So the train was 2.5 hours delayed. Thankfully I had time in the plan to accommodate this.

The following morning, I took the 09:01 Eurostar to Brussels, and then an ICE at 14:25 to Berlin (via Köln). This worked well — rails on the continent are designed for higher temperatures than those in the UK.

The journey was the same in reverse, leaving Berlin at 08:34 in time for a 18:52 Eurostar. It should have been possible to then get the last train from London to the north-west of England on the same day, but in the end I changed plans and visited friends near London for the weekend.

I took 2 litres of water with me each way, and grabbed some food beforehand and at Köln, rather than trying to get food on the train. This worked well.

Within Berlin, I used a single 9EUR monatskarte for all travel. This is an amazing policy by the German government, and subjectively it seemed like it was being widely used. It would be interesting to see how it has affected car usage vs public transport usage over several months.

Eurostar train waiting on the platform at London St Pancras.

Climate

Overall, I estimate the return train trip to Berlin emitted 52kgCO₂e, compared to 2610kgCO₂e from flying Manchester to Guadalajara (via Houston). That’s an impact 50× lower. 52kgCO₂e is about the same emissions as 2 weeks of a vegetarian diet; 2610kgCO₂e is about the same as an entire year of eating a meat-heavy diet.

(Train emissions calculated one-way as 14.8kgCO₂e to London, 4.3kgCO₂e to Brussels, 6.5kgCO₂e to Berlin.)

Tobias gave an impactful talk on climate action, and one of his key points was that significant change can now only happen as a result of government policy changes. Individual consumer choices can’t easily bring about the systemic change needed to prevent new oil and coal extraction, trigger modal shift in transport use, or rethink land allocation to provide sufficient food while allowing rewilding.

That’s very true. One of the exceptions, though, is flying: the choices each of the ~20 people at mini-GUADEC made resulted in not emitting up to 50 tonnes of CO₂e in flights. That’s because flights each have a significant emissions cost, and are largely avoidable. (Doing emissions calculations for counterfactuals is a slippery business, but hopefully the 50 tonne figure is illustrative even if it can’t be precise.)

So it’s pretty excellent that the GNOME community supports satellite conferences, and I strongly hope this is something which we can continue to do for our big conferences in future.

Tourism

After the conference, I had a few days in Berlin. On the recommendation of Zeeshan, I spent a day in the Berlin technical museum, and another day exploring several of the palaces at Potsdam.

It’s easy to spend an entire day at the technical museum. One of the train sheds was closed while I was there, which is a shame, but at least that freed up a few hours which I could spend looking at the printing and the jewellery making exhibits.

One of the nice things about the technical museum is that their displays of old machinery are largely functional: they regularly run demonstrations of entire paper making processes or linotype printing using the original machinery. In most other technical museums I’ve been to, the functioning equipment is limited to a steam engine or two and everything else is a static display.

The palaces in Potsdam were impressive, and look like a maintenance nightmare. In particular, the Grotto Hall in the Neues Palais was one of the most fantastical rooms I’ve ever seen. It’s quite a ridiculous display of wealth from the 18th century. The whole of Sanssouci Park made another nice day out, though taking a picnic would have been a good idea.

Printing exhibition in the technical museum, with a linotype machine.

Thanks!

Thanks again to everyone who organised GUADEC in Guadalajara, Sonny and Tobias for organising the mini-GUADEC, the people at c-base for hosting us and providing A/V support, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring several of us to go to mini-GUADEC.

Mini-GUADEC 2022 in Berlin

GUADEC 2022 has been happening in person for the first time in two years, in Guadalajara. Twenty of us in Europe met up in Berlin for a mini-GUADEC, to attend the main conference remotely. There have been several talks given from here using the nice A/V setup in c-base, who are hosting us.

I gave my talk this afternoon, on the threading rework which is ongoing in gnome-software. The slides are here, the notes are here (source is here), and the recording should be available soon on the GUADEC YouTube channel.

As part of the question and answer session afterwards, it was suggested that it might be helpful to write a blog post about strategies for making async code in C more readable. I’ll try and write something about that soon.

Thanks to the GUADEC organising team for hosting the conference and integrating remote participation so well, to Sonny and Tobias for organising the Berlin mini-GUADEC, and to the c-base technical people for setting things up nicely here.

Berlin DX hackfest and Clang

Last week I was in Berlin at the GNOME DX hackfest. My goal for the hackfest was to do further work on the fledgling gnome-clang, and work out ways of integrating it into GNOME. There were several really fruitful discussions about GIR, static analysis, Clang ASTs, and integration into Builder which have really helped flesh out my plans for gnome-clang.

The idea we have settled on is to use static analysis more pervasively in the GNOME build process. I will be looking into setting up a build bot to do static analysis on all GNOME modules, with the dual aims of catching bugs and improving the static analyser. Eventually I hope the analysis will become fast enough and accurate enough to be enabled on developers’ machines — but that’s a while away yet.

(For those who have no idea what gnome-clang is: it’s a plugin for the Clang static analyser I’ve been working on, which adds GLib- and GObject-specific checks to the static analysis process.)

One key feature I was working on throughout the hackfest was support for GVariant format string checking, which has now landed in git master. This will automatically check variadic parameters against a static GVariant format string in calls to g_variant_new(), g_variant_get() and other similar methods.

For example, this can statically catch when you forget to add one of the elements:

/*
 * Expected a GVariant variadic argument of type ‘int’ but there wasn’t one.
 *         floating_variant = g_variant_new ("(si)", "blah");
 *                                           ^
 */
{
	floating_variant = g_variant_new ("(si)", "blah");
}

Or the inevitable time you forget the tuple brackets:

/*
 * Unexpected GVariant format strings ‘i’ with unpaired arguments. If using multiple format strings, they should be enclosed in brackets to create a tuple (e.g. ‘(si)’).
 *         floating_variant = g_variant_new ("si", "blah", 56);
 *                                           ^
 */
{
	floating_variant = g_variant_new ("si", "blah", 56);
}

After Zeeshan did some smoketesting of it (and I fixed the bugs he found), I think gnome-clang is ready for slightly wider usage. If you’re interested, please install it and try it out! Instructions are on its home page. Let me know if you have any problems getting it running — I want it to be as easy to use as possible.

Another topic I discussed with Ryan and Christian at the hackfest was the idea of a GMainContext visualiser and debugger. I’ve got some ideas for this, and will hopefully find time to work on them in the near future.

Huge thanks to Chris Kühl and Endocode for the use of their offices and their unrivalled hospitality. Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for kindly sponsoring my accommodation; and thanks to my employer, Collabora, for letting me take community days to attend the hackfest.

Developer experience hackfest 2014

Here in sunny Berlin, progress is being made on documentation, developer tools, and Club Mate. I’ve heard rumours of plans for an updated GTK+ data model and widgets. The documentationists are busy alternating between massaging and culling documentation pages. There are excited discussions about the possibilities created by Builder.

I’ve been keeping working on gnome-clang, and have reached a milestone with GVariant error checking:

gvariant-test.c:10:61: error: [gnome]: Expected a GVariant variadic argument of type ‘char *’ but saw one of type ‘guint’.
        some_variant = g_variant_new ("(sss)", "hello", my_string, a_little_int_short_and_stout);
                                                                   ^

More details coming soon, once I’ve tidied it all up and committed it.

Philip Withnall

Free software, the outdoors and the environment.