After a much needed 2 week vacation following GUADEC, finally I’m getting around to writing up a GUADEC post.
GUADEC
Great venue conveniently located close to downtown. I feel like it was a smaller event this year compared to other years that I have attended (which are not many), still; I enjoyed most, if not all of the talks I went to.
Some highlights for me I guess were attending Juan’s Glade talk, he always does something fun with the presentation and creates the presentation using glade which is pretty cool; would always be nice to get some funding for that project as it’s always had potential…
Both Christian and Michael’s talks on Builder and LibreOffice respectively were entertaining and easy to digest.
Probably the most interesting and important talk I attended was Richard Brown’s talk which was about software distribution models and related accountability (broadly speaking). It’s important that we hear the concerns of those who have been maintaining traditional distros, so that we are prepared for the challenges and responsibilities that come with distributing binary stacks (Flatpak runtimes and apps).
My deepest regret is that I missed out on all of Carlos Garnocho’s talks. Here we are all concerned with the one talk we have to give; and meanwhile Carlos is so generous that he is giving three talks, all without breaking a sweat (a round of applause please !).
First and foremost to me, GUADEC is an opportunity to connect in person with the human backend component of the irc personas we interact with on a day to day basis and this is always a pleasure 🙂
So thanks to the local organization team for organizing a great event, and for manning the booths and doing all the stuff that makes this possible, and thanks to everyone who sponsored the event !
BuildStream
It was a huge year so far for BuildStream and I’m very happy with the result so far. Last year we started out in November from scratch and now while our initial road map is not exactly complete, it’s in great shape. This is thanks in no small part to the efforts and insights of my team members who have been dealing with build system related problems for years before me (Sam Thursfield, Jürg Billeter, Jonathan Maw and more).
I threw together a last minute demo for my talk at GUADEC, showing that we can viably build Flatpak runtimes using BuildStream and that we can do it using the same BuildStream project (automatically generated from the current jhbuild modulesets) used to build the rest of GNOME. I messed up the demo a bit because it required a small feature that I wrote up the day before and that had a bug; but I was able to pull it together just in time and show gedit running in an SDK that causes GtkLabels to be upside down (this allowed me to also demo the workspaces and non strict build modes features which I’ve been raving about).
The unconference workshop did not go quite as well as I had hoped; I think I just lacked the talent to coordinate around 15 people and get everyone to follow a step by step hands on experience, lesson learned I guess. Still, people did try building things and there was a lot of productive conversation which went on throughout the workshop.
GNOME & BuildStream
During the unconference days I had some discussions with some of release team members regarding moving forward building GNOME with BuildStream.
The consensus at this time is that we are going to look into a migration after releasing GNOME 3.26 (which is soon !), which means I will be working full time on this for… a while.
Some things we’re looking into (but not all at once):
- Migrate to maintaining a BuildStream project instead of JHBuild modulesets
- Ensure the GNOME BuildStream project can be used to build Flatpak runtimes
- Migrate the Flatpak sdkbuilder machines to use BuildStream to build the GNOME SDK
- Also build the freedesktop SDK using BuildStream as we can tie things in better this way
- Finally replace the Yocto based freedesktop-sdk-base project with a runtime bootstrap built with BuildStream
- Adapt GNOME Continuous to consume the same GNOME BuildStream project, and also have GNOME Continuous contribute to a common artifact share (so developers dont have to build things which GNOME Continuous already built).
These are all things which were discussed but I’m only focusing on landing the first few of the above points before moving on with other enhancements.
Also, I have accepted an invitation to join the GNOME release team !
This probably wont change my life dramatically as I expect I’ll be working on building and releasing GNOME anyway, just in a more “official” capacity.
Summary
This year we did a lot of great work, and GUADEC was a climax in our little BuildStream journey. All in all I enjoyed the event and am happy about where things are going with the project, it’s always exciting to show off a new toy and rewarding when people are interested.
Thanks to everyone who helped make both GUADEC and BuildStream happen !