fidzu : gnome

Downloads

If you're curious about the slides, you can download the PDF or the ODP.

Thanks

This post has been a part of work undertaken by my employer Collabora.

I would like to thank the wonderful organizers of ELC NA for hosting the event.

21 Sep 2019 10:00pm GMT

Downloads

If you're curious about the slides, you can download the PDF or the ODP.

Thanks

This post has been a part of work undertaken by my employer Collabora.

I would like to thank the wonderful organizers of ELC NA for hosting the event.

20 Sep 2019 10:00pm GMT

On Saturday, I wrote an email to the FSF asking them to cancel my membership. Other people who I greatly respect are doing the same. This came after the president of the FSF made some pretty reprehensible remarks saying that the "most plausible scenario is that [one of Epstein's underage victims] presented themselves as entirely willing" while being trafficked. This isn't the only incident, but it is the straw that broke the camel's back.

In my capacity as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I have also written to the FSF. One of the most important parts of my role is to think of the well being of our community and the GNOME mission. One of the GNOME Foundation's strategic goals is to be an exemplary community in terms of diversity and inclusion. I feel we can't continue to have a formal association with the FSF or the GNU project when its main voice in the world is saying things that hurt this aim.

I greatly admire the work of FSF staffers and volunteers, but have now reached the point of concluding that the greatest service to the mission of software freedom is for Richard to step down from FSF and GNU and let others continue in his stead. Should this not happen in a timely manner, then I believe that severing the historical ties between GNOME, GNU and the FSF is the only path forward.

Edit: I've also cross-posted this to the GNOME discourse instance.

16 Sep 2019 6:05pm GMT

Morning at Thessaloniki

Sorry for blogging lately, better late than never.

Thessaloniki is very peaceful place, every morning I liked to walk along the seaside to the venue. As usual, it was a great and enjoyable GUADEC, thanks to everyone who helped to make it.

In core days I attended a lot of great talks in this year, I learned a lot of latest status of GNOME, and here are my favorite talks, "Managing GNOME Sessions with Systemd", "State of the Shell", "Packing up Boxes", "Modernizing Desktop Linux Development with Containers", "Is the Linux Desktop Really Dead?".

I also enjoy watching Lighting talks every year. In this year Britt Yazel's lighting talks, I knew the GUADEC App was based on Connfa, and it's also an open source project. This App is very convenient, I could check schedule at any time.

And after the core days, I took part in "Rust BoF" by SebastianDröge , it's a great BoF to learn the Rust and GStreamer step by step. And of course the Beach BoF, not to be missed, the amazing beach is unforgettable.

GNOME Bingo is a very good ice-break game, it gave me a lot of fun. From it I knew about the current GNOME staffs, GNOME 's Old Farts Club, Daiki Ueno could speak 4 languages counting c++, and so on.

I hope that we could also have GNOME.Asia App and GNOME.Asia Bingo in GNOME.Asia Summit.

Sunset at Thessaloniki

As usual I would like to thanks the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip to Greece and making all this possible, it gave a good chance to meet old and new friends. And also thanks Canonical for conference leave.

16 Sep 2019 3:12pm GMT

Sammy is a freelancer, community organizer, and GNOME enthusiast from Hong Kong. For almost 20 years, Sammy has been using, GNOME and building community in Asia.

Tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Currently, I am a freelancer which works on web scraping, python, data analytics, Linux, and networks. I was an owner and the director of small IT business, with my experiences in the open source, technology, community, and business, I organise local and regional open source communities and conferences in Hong Kong and Asia, travel between Asian and US cities to attend, speak, and organise open source events.

What is your role within the GNOME community?

I co-lead at GNOME Asia committee

Do you have any other affiliations you want to share?

I'm a Mozilla Representative, the President at Open Source Hong Kong, organiser of PyCon HK, and founder of Hong Kong Open Source Conference.

Why did you get involved in GNOME?

I am a GNOME user since 2000, and I think that GNOME is the most important software for Linux desktop. I thought that we should organise an event in Hong Kong for Linux desktop to promote and develop it. GNOME is the key.

Why are you still involved with GNOME?

As a user in Hong Kong, we embrace the different cultures from West and East. I keep my contributions to link up with East and West in different Asia cities when my living and income allows me to do so.

What are you working on right now?

After I take over the leadership at GNOME Asia Committee, I called for meetings for the GNOME.Asia Summit. I communicate with the local team for it.

What are you excited about right now â€" either in GNOME or free and open
source software in general?

It is not easy to sustain a desktop project, but GNOME is still the number one desktop environment on Linux!

What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?

To sustain and grow GNOME, I hope that more GNOME contributors can be employed to achieve different missions of the project, to create more resources (e.g. marketing and documentation) for GNOME. On the other hand, we should also consider how to integrate GNOME and the open web seamlessly. I hope GNOME can become software that is not just a desktop environment, but a desktop ecosystem. It is not only in technical but also in business, the community, and the market.

What do you think GNOME should focus on next?

1. Community building;
2. Educating youth about the open desktop; and
3. Turning the desktop environment to the desktop ecosystem.

Edited for content and clarity. Photo provided by Sammy Fung.

16 Sep 2019 1:43pm GMT

An annoying thing about C code is that there are plenty of functions that cannot be unit-tested by some external framework - specifically anything declared as static. Any larger code-base will end up with hundreds of those functions, many of which are short and reasonably self-contained but complex enough to not trust them by looks only. But since they're static I can't access them from the outside (and "outside" is defined as "not in the same file" here).

The approach I've chosen in the past is to move the more hairy ones into separate files or at least declare them normally. That works but is annoying for some cases, especially those that really only get called once. In case you're wondering whether you have at least one such function in your source tree: yes, the bit that parses your commandline arguments is almost certainly complicated and not tested.

Anyway, this week I've finally found the right combination of hacks to make testing static functions easy, and it's:

• #include the source file in your test code.
• Mock any helper functions you'd need to trick the called functions
• Instruct the linker to ignore unresolved symbols

And boom, you can write test cases to only test a single file within your source tree. And without any modifications to the source code itself.

A more detailed writeup is available in this github repo.

For the impatient, the meson snippet for a fictional source file example.c would look like this:

test('test-example',
     executable('test-example',
                'example.c', 'test-example.c',
                dependencies: [dep_ext_library],
                link_args: ['-Wl,--unresolved-symbols=ignore-all',
                            '-Wl,-zmuldefs',
                            '-no-pie'],
                install: false),
)

There is no restriction on which test suite you can use. I've started adding a few of test cases based on this approach to libinput and so far it's working well. If you have a better approach or improvements, I'm all ears.

12 Sep 2019 4:21am GMT