GNOME Games has been participating in Google Summer of Code for many years, and this one is no exception. This time Andrei Lişiţă a.k.a. Yetizone was implementing a savestate manager.
Andrei’s work involved redoing $XDG_DATA_HOME/gnome-games/ directory layout, writing a migrator for existing data, reworking the app to support having multiple savestates at once, implementing on-demand loading and saving, and implementing the UI.
Check out his blog posts for more information about the project:
- Battle-cruiser operational !
- It “officially” begins
- Same UX, different backend
- Something to show for
- Getting closer
- Almost there
- Towards a happy ending
- GSoC 2019 Final submission
See also his lightning talk at GUADEC 2019 about the project! I couldn’t attend it, but I watched the livestream. :)
It was my first year as a mentor. It did feel a little weird, since I never participated in GSoC as a student, and I’m also a student myself. Nevertheless, the project was finished successfully, so we have a shiny new feature. Most of the work is already merged and will be available in GNOME Games 3.34.0. The two remaining changes will be landed early in 3.36.x cycle.
Andrei is awesome to work with. He started coding early in community bonding period, and needed next to no handholding, so for the the most part of the coding period my involvement was simply answering questions and reviewing code, later testing and reporting bugs.
While the project was finished, I think there are things I think I could do a lot better as a mentor:
- While we were focused on the technical side of the project, I didn’t pay enough attention to the social side. Namely, I didn’t track GUADEC announcements closely (since I couldn’t attend it this year anyway), so Andrei almost ended up missing it. Thanks to Gaurav Agrawal who helped Andrei with registration and requesting travel sponsorship.
- Until the last few weeks, the project consisted of a huge merge request which quickly got unwieldy. For planning we used Matrix. I saw other people using more sophisticated workflows for GSoC, such as networks of small merge requests and issues in interns’ forks on GitLab, which can be reviewed and merged one by one, I think we should have used a workflow like that as well.
- I ended up postponing 3.33.90 release for a week, merging many followup changes during the freeze, and even then merging changes up until 3.33.91 (Since Games is not a core app, we are allowed to do that, but usually we try to follow the freezes nevertheless). This probably wasn’t a good thing to do and I apologize to the translation teams. :(
All in all, I want to thank Andrei for the amazing contribution and for being an awesome person in general. :)