It’s no secret that one of the main features I wanted to land this cycle was introductory support for Xdg-App. There really was quite a bit to do to make that happen, including all sorts of seemingly unrelated plumbing.
One seemingly unrelated piece is the long-anticipated support for “Build Configurations”. I deferred on this feature for as long as possible because it needs to support many movable parts, for which we didn’t have a clear vision of. But now that our applications vision is becoming less and less murky, it was time to attack it.
IdeContext now contains an IdeConfigurationManager. This object can be used to get access to available configurations (IdeConfiguration). A configuration currently contains a target device (IdeDevice), a target runtime (IdeRuntime), environment variables (IdeEnvironment), and various other common properties.
We’ve ambitiously tried to avoid writing random dot files to your project, but time has come to add one. If you create a build configuration, we’ll drop a small .buildconfig GKeyFile in the root of your project tree. It contains the necessary information to bootstrap your project or build it with a given Xdg-App runtime.
Currently, we only have two runtime implementations. The default, is simply the host system. Think of it as a pass-through runtime. The second, is an Xdg-App runtime. It uses the runtime SDK installed via the xdg-app command line tool. For 3.22, I expect to have UI to install runtime SDKs.
You might imagine additional runtimes that we could create. Jhbuild is an obvious one, although hopefully it is less and less necessary now that we have a nightly GNOME SDK.
