Tag Archives: Flatpak

Going to GUADEC: talking about the state of GLib and metered data handling in downloads

I’ll be at GUADEC in Almería this year, giving two talks on Sunday:

  • GLib: What’s new and what’s next?, which will be a general overview of recent developments in the GNOME utility library, some future plans, and some stats about what happens to contribution rates when you move to GitLab and Meson.
  • Download management on metered connections, which will be an overview of the Mogwai project, which I’ve worked on in recent months at Endless. Mogwai is a download scheduler, which your code can use to determine the best time to do a big download to avoid incurring bandwidth charges from your internet provider (if you’re on a metered connection).

I won’t be arriving until Sunday morning, but will be around until Thursday (12th) morning, and will be in the GTK+/GLib BoF on Monday in room 2 to plot the next GLib release.

Shout out to my coworker Matthew Leeds’ talk, on P2P Distribution of Flatpaks and OSTrees, which comes towards the culmination of a lot of work by him (and others in Endless, and upstream OSTree and flatpak) to introduce peer to peer support in OSTree and flatpak, so you can distribute OSs and apps using USB sticks and the LAN.

GUADEC 2017: sun, rain, Coverity, walks

GUADEC 2017 has ended in Manchester. It’s been great; thanks to the organisers and sponsors for a fun conference (this year’s highlight: a preponderance of Tiki bars).

We’ve had sun and heat, and we’ve had rain and more rain. Often within the same hour. On the final day of the conference, a group of us went out to Edale to do some walks to see the Peak District, a national park area near Manchester. This is an area I’ve visited many times before, so it was fun to be able to show it to GNOME people.

This year I gave a talk about the Coverity scans I’ve been running on various GNOME and freedesktop modules for the last year. The slides are online and the video will be up with the rest of the GUADEC videos. If you have a security-critical (or other) module which you’d like to be included in the scan set, let me know. Coverity’s good at finding bugs in complex control flows, but you do need to put some time into triaging its reports. I’m happy to provide guidance about using it.

I spent a fair amount of time during the unconference days reviewing Simon McVittie’s D-Bus work to add support for app-containers into the D-Bus specification and dbus-daemon. This is the first part of an effort to improve support for exposing unconfined D-Bus services to confined app-containers safely and efficiently. The rest of my time was spent working on exciting support for updating flatpak over the LAN for Endless OS. I’ll blog about this more in future.

Thanks to the GUADEC team for organising a great conference, the conference sponsors, and to my employer, Endless, for sponsoring me to go.

Building a GNOME nightly app: Hitori

Following on from earlier efforts to make Hitori a flatpak app, it’s now available as a GNOME nightly app (click here to install), built from git master.

Thanks to hard work by Alex Larsson and others, this was ridiculously easy (see the wiki page on it):

  1. Write flatpak manifest with source and build instructions for Hitori (test locally with flatpak-builder)
  2. Add .app file pointing to it in gnome-apps-nightly
  3. Wait for build to complete
  4. Add .flatpakref file pointing to the build in gnome-apps-nightly

Speaking of Hitori, I don’t have much time to maintain it at the moment, and there are some interesting open feature requests. If anybody is looking for a fun little project to take on, I am happy to mentor work on them.

GTK+ hackfest 2016

A dozen GNOME hackers invaded the Red Hat office in Toronto last week, to spend four days planning the next year of work on our favourite toolkit, GTK+; and to think about how Flatpak applications can best integrate with the rest of the desktop.

What did we do?

  • Worked out an approach for versioning GTK+ in future, to improve the balance between stability and speed of development. This has turned into a wiki page.
  • I demoed Dunfell and added support for visualising GTasks to it. I don’t know how much time I will have for it in the near future, so help and feedback are welcome.
  • There was a detailed discussion of portals for Flatpak, including lots of use cases, and the basics of a security design were decided which allows the most code reuse while also separating functionality. Simon has written more about this.
  • I missed some of the architectural discussion about the future of GTK+ (including moving some classes around, merging some things and stripping out some outdated things), but I believe Benjamin had useful discussions with people about it.
  • Allan, Philip, Mike and I looked at using hotdoc for developer.gnome.org, and possible layouts for a new version of the site. Christian spent some time thinking about integration of documentation into GNOME Builder.
  • Allison did a lot of blogging, and plotted with Alex to add some devious new GVariant functionality to make everyone’s lives easier when writing parsers — I’ll leave her to blog about it.

Thanks to Collabora for sending me along to take part!

After the hackfest, I spent a few days exploring Toronto, and as a result ended up very sunburned.