This is one of those back to work posts you intend to write and then kick yourself for forgetting… after a few starts this week I finally managed to squeeze in the time to finish this post.
Last week thanks to Codethink, I was able to travel to Brussels and attend the DX Hackfest followed by FOSDEM. What follows is a run down of things we did there.
Day 0
The Hackfest started on the 27th so I had arrived in Brussels on the 26th bright and early, after around 16 hours of travel including the layover. Feeling hungry, I stumbled out of my hotel room which was downtown by Sainte-Catherine square to fetch a kebab sandwhich. I was thoroughly enjoying my messy pita and fries at a small kebab shack beside the church and by coincidence Juan Pablo was moseying by, admiring the view and taking pictures of the church. With a healthy streak of spicy mayonnaise dripping down my face I called out his name so as not to miss him.
Juan and I had a bit of a chance to talk about what things Glade we could accomplish in our short time in Brussels.
Of course, property bindings came up, which is something that we have wanted for a long time, and Denis Washington had attempted before as his gsoc project.
No, we did not implement that, but here are a few reasons why we determined it was a no go for a few days of intense hacking:
Property Sensitivity
Glade has a notion about object properties having a sensitive or insensitive state, this is determined and driven by the widget adaptor of the object type owning a given property. This is typically used in cases where it makes no sense to set a given property, for instance we make the GtkLabel’s wrap mode property insensitive when the label is not set to wrap.
When considering that a property can be set up as a binding target, it stands to reason that the bound property editor should also be insensitive, as it makes no sense to give it a value if it’s value is driven by another property. Further, it may also make no sense to allow binding of a property at all if the given target property is meaningless in the current widget’s configuration. So, for instance when setting a GtkButton to use custom content instead of the icon name & label, we would have to undoably clear the binding state of the icon name property as well as it’s value.
Cut, Copy & Paste
When we cut, copy and paste in Glade we do so with branches of an object hierarchy. Some interesting new cases we would have to handle include:
- When we paste a hierarchy in which contains a property source/target pair, we should have the new target property re-routed to the copied source object property.
- When we paste a hierarchy which contains a bound property for which the source object is outside of the pasted hierarchy, we should maintain that binding in the pasted hierarchy so that it continues to reference the same out-of-hierarchy source.
- When we paste a hierarchy which contains a bound property for which the source object is outside of the pasted hierarchy, but paste it in a separate project / glade file, the originally bound property should be cleared as it refers to a source property that is now in a different project.
So, after having considered some of the complexities of this, we decided not to be over ambitious and set our sights on lower hanging fruit.
Day 1
On day one we met up relatively bright and early at the betacowork space where the hackfest took place. Some of the morning was spent looking at the agenda and seeing if there were specific things people wanted to talk about, however, as Glade has a huge todo list it makes little sense to think too far ahead about bright and shiny desirable features so I did not add anything to the agenda.
Juan and I had decided that we can absolutely support glade files which do not always specify the ID field, which GtkBuilder has not been requiring for some time now. The benefit of adding this seemingly mundane feature to Glade is mostly better support for Glade files in the wild. Since the ID field is not required by GtkBuilder anymore, it turns out that many hand written files in the wild can no longer be loaded in Glade.
We spent around an hour discussing what issues we might face, and decided the path of least resistance would be to always have an ID internally under a special prefix __glade_unnamed_, so we just avoid serialization of the ID of those objects which are unnamed and we invent them as we load files that omit the ID.
Further, we ensure at all times that if an object is referred to as a property of another object, it must always have an explicit name. We achieve the rollover when running the object selection dialog, if any object is selected as a property of another object; the referred object is given a traditional name like label1 undoably while assigning that reference.
By the end of the day this was working pretty well…
Day 2
By now we thought we had pretty much everything covered for the ID’less widgets, and then we encountered the <action-widgets> of GtkDialog and GtkInfoBar.
These have the unfortunate history of being implemented in an odd way, and I’m not sure how far back this dates, but historically you would denote an action widget by giving it a Response ID integer property and placing the widget in the action area. Since some version of GTK+ 3.x (or possibly even 3.0 ?) we need to refer to these action widgets by their ID in the Glade file and serialize an <action-widgets> node containing those references.
This should ideally be changed in Glade so that the dialog & infobar have actual references to the action widgets (consequently forcing them to have an ID), and probably have another object selection dialog allowing one to select widgets inside of the GtkDialog / GtkInfoBar hierarchy as action widgets. If however the <action-widgets> semantic is newer than GTK+ 3.0 then it gets quite tricky to make this switch and still support the older semantics of adding buttons with response IDs into the action area.
In any case, we settled on simply forcing the action widgets to have an ID at save time, without any undo support, for the singular case of GtkDialog/GtkInfoBar action widgets, disturbingly this also includes autosave, and annoyingly modifies the Glade datamodel without any undoable user interaction, but it’s the corner case hack.
After this road block, and ironing out a few other obstacles (like serializing the ID’s even if they dont exist when launching the preview, which requires an ID to preview)… we were able to at least nail this feature by the end of Day 2.
I also closed this bug by ensuring we dont handle scroll events in the already scrolling property editor, something we probably should have done many years ago.
Also, Juan Pablo revived the old school logo (for those who recall the flaming globe logo) in Glade’s workspace so the workspace is a little more fancy. This tribute to the older logo has in fact has been present for years in the loading screen. Unfortunately… there is only a small number of users who work on projects which contain thousands of widgets, so most of you have been missing out on the awesome old logo tribute, which will now appear in it’s full glory in the background of Glade’s workspace.
Day 3
By now we are getting a bit tired, this post hasn’t covered the more gory details but as we were in Brussels, of course we had the responsibility of sampling every kind of beer. By around 4 pm I was falling asleep at my desk, but before that I was able to make a pass through the GTK+ widget catalog and update it with new deprecations and newly added properties and signals, in some cases updating the custom editors to integrate the new properties nicely. For instance GtkLabel now has a “lines” property which is only sensitive and relevant if ellipsis and word wrapping are enabled simultaneously.
We also fixed a few more bugs.
FOSDEM
And then there was FOSDEM, my first time attending this conference, I was planning on sleeping in but managed to arrive around 10am.
I enjoyed hanging around the booths and mingling mostly, which led to a productive conversation with Andre Klapper about various bug tracking and workflow solutions. I attended some talks in the distros dev room; Sam Thursfield gave his talk about the benefits of using declarative and structured data to represent build and integration instructions in build systems. I also enjoyed some libreoffice talks.
By the end of the second day and just in the nick of time, I was informed that if I had not gotten a waffle from a proper waffle van at the venue, then I had not “really been to FOSDEM”. I hurried along and was lucky enough to catch one of the last waffles off of a closing van, which was indeed the most delicious waffle I’ve ever tasted.
I guess the conclusion is that waffles are not what FOSDEM is all about, and that’s a good thing – I’d rather be eating a waffle at a conference about free software, than writing free software at a conference about waffles.
Looks like you had fun!