We had aarch64 builds of the runtime since the very early days of Flatpak (long before Flathub), and you could manually build your applications for aarch64 natively or by using qemu. Now you will also be able to download aarch64 builds of GNOME applications straight from the Nightly repository so all 3 of you out there with such machines can finally rejoice.
The person mostly responsible for this is my good friend Julian Sparber who got around shorting through all the infrastructure needed and baited me into fixing the edge cases. Special thanks also to Bart for taking care of the GitLab Runners as usual.
We’ve also updated the CI guide to include the aarch64 builds, here is an example Merge Request for gnome-weather. In short this is what you need to have in your .gitlab-ci.yml to test and push the builds into the repository.
Quick heads up, the GNOME Nightly Flatpak repository is currently undergoing maintenance, during which you may notice that some applications are currently missing from the repo.
For a couple of months now we have been plagued by a few bugs that have made maintenance of the repo very hard, and CI builds were constantly failing due to a lack of available space. In order to resolve this we had to wipe the majority of the refs/objects in the repository and start again with safeguards in place.
As such, we are currently re-populating the repository with fresh builds of all the applications, but it may take a while. If you want to help with this, make sure your Flatpak manifests are up to date and build-able, and that you have set up a daily or weekly scheduled CI build in your project. Your app may not be changing, but the runtime might, and it’s good to be on top of possible API/ABI breaks.
Go to your project, Settings -> CI/CD -> Schedules -> New schedule button -> Select the daily preset.
If you are a user and seeing warnings while updating, don’t worry – you won’t have to do anything and updates will start working again transparently once the applications are available in the repository.
$ flatpak update
Looking for updates…
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since runtime/org.gnome.Todo.Devel.Locale/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'runtime/org.gnome.Todo.Devel.Locale/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since runtime/org.gnome.TextEditor.Devel.Locale/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'runtime/org.gnome.TextEditor.Devel.Locale/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since runtime/org.gnome.TextEditor.Devel.Debug/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'runtime/org.gnome.TextEditor.Devel.Debug/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since runtime/org.gnome.Photos.Locale/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'runtime/org.gnome.Photos.Locale/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since runtime/org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel.Locale/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'runtime/org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel.Locale/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since app/org.gnome.Todo.Devel/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'app/org.gnome.Todo.Devel/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since app/org.gnome.TextEditor.Devel/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'app/org.gnome.TextEditor.Devel/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since app/org.gnome.Photos/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'app/org.gnome.Photos/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
F: Warning: Treating remote fetch error as non-fatal since app/org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel/x86_64/master is already installed: No such ref 'app/org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel/x86_64/master' in remote gnome-nightly
Before we start, let’s get this out of the way because the week long delirium on social media has dragged enough.
Yes, libadwaita “hardcodes” Adwaita. Yes, applications, as is, will not be following a custom system theme. Yes this does improve the default behavior of application for GNOME when run on other platforms like Elementary OS. However, this is the result of a technical limitation, and not some evil plot as Twitter will keep telling you…
The reason is that in order for High Contrast (and the upcoming Dark Style) to work, libadwaita needs to override the theme name property so it doesn’t fallback to GTK’s “Default” High Contrast style. The “Default” style is an older version of Adwaita, not your system style.
Compared to GTK 3, there isn’t a new way to enforce the “hardcoded” style. The GTK_THEMEDebug variable still works, as does ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css which you can use to set more permanent changes, and there are probably 3 other ways of doing this. The process to theme your system might be a bit different compared to GTK 3 but it will still work. Likewise, if you are developing a distribution, you have control of the end product and can do anything you want with the code. There is a plethora of options available. Apparently complaining on social media and bullying volunteers into submission was one such option…
And I guess this also needs to be stated: this change only affects apps that choose to use libadwaita and adopt the GNOME Design Guidelines, not “every” GTK 4 application.
As usual, the fact that the themes keep working doesn’t mean they are supported. The same issues about restyling applications when they don’t expect it apply and GNOME can not realistically support arbitrary stylesheets that none of the contributors develop against and test.
Now onto the actual blogpost.
There seems to be some confusion when it comes to libadwaita’s stylesheet and coloring APIs. It’s easy to mix them up when you haven’t heard of libadwaita before, so here is a short introduction on what they are and how they differ.
Keep in mind that the features discussed below are not guaranteed to land. After libadwaita 1.0 the stylesheet will be frozen and treated as an API. That means that if a feature doesn’t make it by 1.0 it will be a breaking change and will have to wait for libadwaita 2.0.
An Application Coloring API / Accent Colors
The idea here is that you can define “accent” colors to be applied for various parts of widgets. You can also recolor any part of a widget however you like. Take a look at Epiphany’s private mode header bar for an example. For this to be possible the whole stylesheet had to be reworked. Extra care was needed to ensure that the functionality wouldn’t conflict with the high contrast preference and wouldn’t need special handling. I hope Alexander will blog about this work in more detail, as it was truly fascinating. I am very excited to see what developers do with the coloring API.
For now the colors can be controlled with the GTK-specific @define-color, similar to CSS variables. Programmatic API will be added later on as the dust settles. The API will be based on AdwStyleManager which is getting introduced by the Dark style preference MR and hasn’t landed yet.
GNOME Patterns application showcasing the capabilities of the CSS styles.
For a more detailed example of what you can do check Federico’s recent blogpost.
System Accents
This is heavily inspired by system accent settings in elementary OS, and it’s similar in function. Think of it like a way to set the accent color system-wide, then applications can read it and decide to follow or override it. A case where you want to override would be if your app had a Sepia mode for example.
The coloring API mentioned above is designed in a way that makes this feature easy to implement. The interface and UI for this are not yet fleshed out completely, and it’s debatable if it’s going to be implemented/merged at all. There are a couple of design issues and concerns that need further research. It’s a possibility, but don’t bet on it.
Picture of the Elementary OS 6 Appearance Settings panel.
Vendor Styling
The story behind this idea is extensive and best left for another post, so here’s the current status on this infamous topic.
There have been great accomplishments to reducing the possible fallout of restyling applications with brand colors. Nowadays vendors recognize that arbitrary restyling can be damaging to application developers and have taken some precautions.
Yaru reworked its style and rebased it on Adwaita, this helped reduced the changes to mostly the color palette and minor stylistic tweaks. This got rid of a lot of bugs surfacing in applications, as Yaru now at least has the same spacing, margins and padding as Adwaita. Pop!_OS followed suit shortly after, I believe it’s now based on Yaru.
However, both Ubuntu and Pop also introduced “Dark-modes”, Pop making it the default, which broke applications’ expectations. They did it despite being warned about it. As a result this ended up increasing the issues with theming by about an order of magnitude as now you would frequently end up with black on black, grey on grey and other fun coloring bugs. It should also be noted that neither Ubuntu nor System 76 approached any contributor I know of, about properly implementing a Dark Style preference upstream. Even though GNOME and Elementary contributors had beencollaborating in public for the last 3 years.
Screenshot of gedit with Yaru Dark stylesheet, where the selected text becomes invisible.
Yaru developers did some research on the topic and there was a call for engagement by GNOME, but unfortunately ever since the last theming BoF in 2019, the conversation had dried up. The interested parties haven’t provided any details on what the scope of the API would need to be, how it would look like, or the detailed requirements. Nobody stepped up to help with the Adwaita changes that were required either, or with dark mode, or to work on the QA tooling, or to figure out the implementation details. Now we are sadly out of time for libadwaita 1.0 and there isn’t much hope for such a complex thing to be ready in the next 4 months.
Conclusion
For libadwaita 1.0 and GNOME 42 the work on recoloring widgets will likely be completed. A proper Dark Style setting will likely also be implement by then. System-wide accent colors are being discussed and looked at, but there are design related concerns about them, so it’s possible that they will never land. And there won’t be any “Theming API” for libadawaita 1.0. Maybe there will be renewed interest from the vendors that want it in the future, but given the story so far, I won’t hold my breath. I hope to be proven wrong.
This only affects GNOME Nightly, if you are using the stable runtimes you have nothing to worry about
It’s that time of the year again. We’ve updated the base of the GNOME Nightly Flatpak runtime to the Freedesktop-SDK 21.08 beta release.
This brings lots of improvements and updates to the underlying toolchain, but it also means that between yesterday and today, there is an ABI break and that all your Nightly apps will need to be rebuilt against the newer base.
Thankfully this should be as simple as triggering a new Gitlab CI pipeline. If you merge anything that will also trigger a new build as well.
I suggest you also take the time to set up a daily scheduled CI job so that your applications keep up with runtime changes automatically, even if there hasn’t been new activity in the app for some time. It’s quite simple.
Go to the your project, Settings -> CI/CD -> Schedules -> New schedule button -> Select the daily preset.
Last week I needed a Debian system to test things, I had heard others were using toolbox with Debian images without much trouble so decided to give it a go instead of creating a VM.
Toolbox only requires a handful utilities to work with any given docker image. After a quick search I stumbled upon Philippe’s post which in turn linked into this PR about an Ubuntu based toolbox image. Looks like the last major issues where worked out recently in toolbox and there isn’t anything extra needed apart the image.
Until the upstream PR is merged, I’ve adapted the image for Debian Sid and inlined the deps in one Dockerfile so its easier to fetch it and use it. The Dockerfile is hosted in a gist here.
You watched Matthias’s talk at Linux App Summit last week and you wish you could try the demos yourself? Excellent!
During the Q&A section, Cassidy James asked if there was any Flatpak available, an hour after that we published a Nightly version of GTK4 Demo along with the Widget factory and the Icon Browser in GNOME’s Nightly repository.
To try it all you need to do is the following:
$ flatpak install https://nightly.gnome.org/repo/appstream/org.gtk.Demo4.flatpakref
$ flatpak run org.gtk.Demo4
The Flatpak is built by the GTK CI pipeline for on each commit so it will be updatable as time goes. You can try the most bleeding edge there is, all in its little isolated sandbox without worrying about messing with your system or having to go through the soul crashing process of figuring out how to build software.
If you are curious how we do CI/CD with Flatpak, take a look at the Merge Request and the relevant wiki page.
With the release of GNOME 3.38.0, we started producing and distributing bootable VM images for debugging and testing features before they hit any distribution repository. We called the images GNOME OS. The name itself is not new, and what it stands for has not changed dramatically since it was introduced, but let’s restate its goals.
GNOME OS aims to better facilitate development of GNOME by providing a working system for development, design, and user testing purposes.
The main feature of GNOME OS is that we can produce a new system image for each commit made in any of our modules. The ability to have these VM images is truly amazing since we are dealing with hundreds of modules that depend and integrate with each other, and with the lower layers of the OS stack. This effort represents a game changer with regards to being able to automate the boot and session initialization, testing design and implementation changes, catching regressions earlier in the development cycle, and many other possibilities.
GNOME OS will also allow the engagement team to more easily create visual assets ahead of the release, present features and raise bug fixes with the free and open source software community at large, and make initiatives like the release video a lot simpler. Journalists will be able to get their hands on the new release of GNOME before the final release.
What GNOME OS is not
Despite the its name, GNOME OS should not be regarded as GNOME’s own platform or general purpose operating system. As much as I would personally like for it to be, and have talked in the past about it, we have to recognize that it’s not, and for good reasons. In its current state, GNOME OS is still an incomplete reference system. It’s the closest approximation that we have to a GNOME platform OS, but we don’t actually have the resources that would be required to support a fully realized, general purpose OS for everyday use.
Maintaining an OS would, at the bare minimum, require keeping up with security fixes (CVEs), doing hardware enablement, and having some kind of user support story. Each one of these is a gigantic task requiring a dedicated team to do properly, and GNOME is not currently set up to be able to tackle them. Distributions put a lot of effort into building their platforms to maintain the changes coming from various upstreams and QAing them together.
Furthermore, many GNOME contributors are already working for companies that develop distributions (Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE, Endless, etc.) and it’s unclear how many would be willing or able to maintain another one.
Who is it for?
Firstly it’s for designers, so they no longer have to suffer through countless hours of trying to build software themselves, in order to test the latest development versions of some of our coremodules (most notably GNOME Shell). Tightening that feedback loop is incredibly valuable for delivering a polished product. After that, it’s for the release team, so it can validatereleases before slinging them out the door; for developers and translators, so they can have a complete system to test and debug their changes on; for our downstream distributors and OS vendors, so that they can have a known to be working baseline against which they can compare their own products. Last but not least, it’s for the machines and robots that keep an eye out for regressions.
Recently, gitlab-runner got support for running jobs inside windows containers. This simplifies a lot the setup needed to get a windows CI job up and running, and it makes it similar how we do linux builds.
Windows though has a couple of gotchas, the behavior of docker on windows can vastly vary depending on which binary and/or configuration you use.
Containers on windows are dependent on the server version of the Host. For example, your server 2016 (1607) containers can only be executed on a server 2016 host. Currently there are 2 popular base versions that docker supports, Server 2016, and 2019. Gitlab-runner only supports server 2019, so we will go with that.
Microsoft recently introduced a set of Process isolation apis, where up till now docker had been using a hyper-v backend to launch containers. This results in possibly more light-weight containers as opposed to light VMs with Hyper-V, but also now now docker for windows has 2 isolation backends, which can affect differently the behavior of your containers! Proccess Isolation seems to be the default for Server 2019.
Next you want to go and install docker, so you look up the Microsoft documentation. There’s one option for the servers, but there’s also an option for Docker Desktop for Windows 10, and to add to this Docker Desktop itself has 2 versions depending if you want the Community or Enterprise Edition! Also, you can’t install Docker on windows 10 the same way you would do on the Server, so you are left having to mix different binaries and hope everything works out. Spoiler, it didn’t work for me! There were couple of build/networking failure when using Docker Desktop, where the same Dockerfile built fine on the server host.
Bonus round:
Docker Desktop has 2 modes, one for running linux containers and one for windows containers! We talked about the 2 different isolation backends for windows above. Now it looks like the linux containers mode got a backend based on WSL2 in addition to the existing hyper-v backend it has been using.
Hope you made it to the end without losing count of all the different “containers” in the windows land. 🙂
Its has been more than a month since Guadec wrapped up, though I’ve been busy and did not manage to write my report till now.
Traveling
I was a bit anxious about the travel, It was my first time flying and not only that but I had to spent the night in the Airport due to departure being at 6am. The flights went smoothly and I arrived at Málaga in the evening. Afterwards I took a bus to get to Almeria, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that other gnomies were also on board.
View of Málaga from a plain, right before landing.
Talks
There were many exciting talks. In particular I really enjoyed the Auditorium track, on Saturday, about Flatpak and Buildstream. At Sunday I attended Carlos Soriano’s talk Devops for GNOME and Tobias Bernard’s Designing GNOME Mobile. I was really looking forward to Federico’s talk too, sadly couldn’t make it in time and watched it online instead.
BoF days
On Monday morning I attended the Librem 5 BoF along with Julian Sparber in order to talk about Fractal and the Messages Application with the folks from Purism. We discussed Fractal’s upcoming features and plans going forward. Afterwards I head over to the Gitlab Workshop to help with whatever I could. During that time Jean Felder and I debugged an issue and we got Music Development build to run along side Music stable/system install succesfully!
The highlight of Tuesday was the Theming BoF. It was really interesting so many different groups attending and discussing the issues the Design Team brought forward. App developers, Platform developers, Downstream, Designers and even Elementary folks were there to give their opinion and talk about their experience and how they deal with such issues in Elementary. Tobias Bernard and Elementary Summarized them both really well in their posts here, and here. Cassidy James also took great notes and added them to the wiki page of the BoF here.
Jakub presenting the new Icon designs.
Wednesday was also packed. In the morning we had the What is a GNOME App BoF. More on that another time though, Carlos and Tobias are working on a proper Proposal. After that Tobias and I took some time to work on the blocker issues, before making the first “public” release of the new Podcasts app for GNOME. We’ve been working on the app for the past year, and its now available on Flathub!
Social Events
By far the thing I enjoyed the most from GUADEC was the social events. Talking with people about all sorts of thing and seeing perspectives of others from all around the world was a magical experience and though-provoking. I don’t really like going to the beach, but I loved both the beach party and the Sandcastle BoFs. The visit to the Alcazaba Castle and the Flamenco show afterwards was absolutely delightful too.
View of the Alcazaba Castle Walls.
A big thanks to the Foundation
My trip was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Thanks a lot to the volunteers at the Travel committee for all their hard work and making it possible for me to attend GUADEC!
This is a follow-up to Carlos Soriano’s blog post about the new GNOME workflow that has emerged following the transition to gitlab.gnome.org. The post is pretty damn good and if you haven’t read it already you should. In this post I will walk through setting up the Flatpak build and test job that runs on the nautilus CI. The majority of the work on this was done by Carlos Soriano and Ernestas Kulik.
Let’s start by defining what we want to accomplish. First of all we want to ensure that every commit commit will be buildable in a clean environment and against a Flatpak runtime. Second to that, we want to ensure that the each project’s test suite will be run and pass. After these succeed we want to be able to export the resulting Flatpak to install and/or test it locally. Lastly we don’t want to waste precious time of the shared CI runners from other projects so we want to utilize Flatpak’s ostree artifacts for caching.
To summarize we want to achieve the following:
Build the project
Run the Test-Suite
Create a Flatpak package/bundle and export it
Use a caching mechanism to reduce build times
Building the project
If your Flatpak manifest targets gnome-3.26/3.28 or Freedesktop-1.6 runtime you can use these container images, provided by the Flatpak project directly. They are a good fit for your stable release branches too. Nautilus master branch though, as most GNOME projects, targets the GNOME Nightly runtime. I created a custom image using the same process the stable 3.26/3.28 images are built. It will be updated every day an hour after the new Nightly runtime is composed. You can use it by changing the image: key in the .gitlab-ci.yml to point to registry.gitlab.com/alatiera/gnome-nightly-oci/gnome-master:latest. Currently we invoke Flatpak builder manually to build the resulting Flatpak, the reason this happens is that the manifest is always pointing at Gnome/nautilus/master branch which would ignore the fork/branch we want it to build. That’s why we do the following in nautilus to sidestep that.
script:
- flatpak-builder --stop-at=nautilus app build-aux/flatpak/org.gnome.Nautilus.json
# Make sure to keep this in sync with the Flatpak manifest, all arguments
# are passed except the config-args because we build it ourselves
- flatpak build app meson --prefix=/app --libdir=/app/lib -Dprofile=development -Dtests=all _build
- flatpak build app ninja -C _build install
- flatpak-builder --finish-only --repo=repo app build-aux/flatpak/org.gnome.Nautilus.json
This builds all the modules up till nautilus. Then we take over and build nautilus ourselves with from the local checkout. Finally we call again the manifest to finish the build.
It works with Sdk-extensions too
There’s a small caveat here, I was only able to use sdk-extensions with flatpak-builder.
It’s probably possible to use flatpak build too, but my knowledge of Flatpak
is limited. If you know of a way to do it better please let me know!
I’ve created a Rust-sdk image for my own use. Here is an example of how to use its used.
If you need any other sdk-extension, like C#, open an issue in this repo or even better make an MR!
Running tests inside the Flatpak environment
In order to run the nautilus test suite we will add the following line:
flatpak build app ninja -C _build test
If your testsuite requires a display, you could use Xvfb. Since it’s quite common for GNOME apps I’ve included it in the gnome-nightly container image directly so you won’t have it to install it. Hopefully you can just prefix the above command with xvfb-run ... args cmd
xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 1024x768x24" flatpak build app ninja -C _build test
Thanks to Emmanuele Bassi for showing me how to get the display tests up and running withxvfb.
Retrieving a Flatpak package
To export a Flatpak bundle, named nautilus-dev.flatpak, we will add the following line:
Then we will add an artfact: block in order to extract our Flatpak package and be able to download it and extract it locally.
artifacts:
paths:
- nautilus-dev.flatpak
expire_in: 2 days
After that there should be a “Browse” and a “Download” button in the job’s logs from where you can download the Flatpak bundle. You can either get a zip with all the artifacts upon clicking “Download” or get the individual nautilus-dev.flatpak from “Browse”. After that to install it you can either open it with gnome-software (probably KDE discover too) or with the following command:
flatpak install --bundle nautilus-dev.flatpak
Caching in-between builds
In order to introduce caching in between CI runs we just need to add the following lines. In principle this should work, but there seem to be frequent cache misses that I am still investigating. If anyone is able to reduce the misses somehow please let me know.
cache:
paths:
- .flatpak-builder/cache
Complete config
Here is how the nautilus .gitlab-ci.yml config for the Flatpak job looks like right now. It might have slightly changed depending on when you read this.
flatpak:
image: registry.gitlab.com/alatiera/gnome-nightly-oci/gnome-master:latest
stage: test
script:
- flatpak-builder --stop-at=nautilus app build-aux/flatpak/org.gnome.Nautilus.json
# Make sure to keep this in sync with the Flatpak manifest, all arguments
# are passed except the config-args because we build it ourselves
- flatpak build app meson --prefix=/app --libdir=/app/lib -Dprofile=development -Dtests=all _build
- flatpak build app ninja -C _build install
- flatpak-builder --finish-only --repo=repo app build-aux/flatpak/org.gnome.Nautilus.json
# Make a Flatpak Nautilus bundle for people to test
- flatpak build-bundle repo nautilus-dev.flatpak --runtime-repo=https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo org.gnome.NautilusDevel
# Run automatic tests inside the Flatpak env
- xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 1024x768x24" flatpak build app ninja -C _build test
artifacts:
paths:
- nautilus-dev.flatpak
- _build/meson-logs/meson-log.txt
- _build/meson-logs/testlog.txt
expire_in: 2 days
cache:
paths:
- .flatpak-builder/cache
Going forward
The current config is not ideal yet. We have to keep it in sync with various parts of the Flatpak manifest and essentially replicate half of the functionality that’s specified in it. It would be nice if we could use the usual oneliner to build the Flatpak instead.
Also the cache misses issues mentioned above are driving me mad, when setting up gnome-builder‘s CI it would spend 11/12min rebuilding all the dependencies and half a minute building gnome-builder. What seems to happen is that it hits the ostree cache points for gnome-builder, but it is rejecting them for the modules/dependencies. Never figured out why sadly.
The Wikipedia page of Xvfb states that it has been replaced by xf86-video-dummy since X.org 7.8 and someone should probably look into using that for the tests instead.
But this setup should be good enough to get you started. If you are an app maintainer and would want to set this up but don’t have time or you are having trouble with something I want to hear from you! Feel free to ping me anytime at #gnome-hackers or send me an email.