Berlin, DX hackfest, Boxes, rain & sunshine
I just flew back from Berlin where I spent the last week, mainly to participate in the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest. As you can see from blog posts from other awesome gnomies, the hackfest was a pretty big success.
I focused on the use of virtual machines (as thats right up my alley) for making application development as easy as possible. I talked to Christian, who has been working on an IDE for GNOME about his idea of a simulator VM which allows the developer to quickly test their app in a pristine environment. We discussed if and how Boxes can be involved. After some discussion we decided that we probably don't want to use Boxes but rather create another binary that re-uses the existing virtualization infrastructure: libvirt, qemu, spice (and maybe libosinfo) etc.
Another way to make GNOME development easy through VM would be what we already have on a very crude level: Distribution of ready-made VMs with all the development environment setup. Continuous already creates and distributes ready VM disk images of latest GNOME (almost everything from git) and Boxes can import these images. These images however are insufficient and unreliable since they do not contain any metadata, especially recommended/required system resources, about the VM. Christian recommended VMware's wmx format but that turned out to only contain metadata instead and you'd need a separate file (vmdk) for the disk image with that. What we really need here is a format that contains both metadata and all disk images in one file, in other words a virtual appliance. After doing some research on this, I once again came to the conclusion that OVF is our only hope here. Not only its one file that can contain all important aspects of a VM, its an open standard that is agreed and implemented by many different vendors. Boxes being able to import/export from/to this format and Continuous being able to provide these virtual appliances wouldn't just enable a more reliable producer-consumer relationship between Continuous and Boxes but also allow individual developers to be easily able to share their work with others: "Hey! I've been working on this project/feature X last few days and want to get some input. I'm sending you the VM, just import it in Boxes and let me know what you think..".
We've actually been wanting to have this feature for a very long time and I've mentioned the need for OVF support quite a few times so I decided its about time I do something about it. So during the hackfest, I designed the minimum interface for a library to convert from/to libvirt domain (or configuration) to/from OVF files and started the implementation too. I hope to continue working on it to have something demoable by end of this month.
Some other discussions/activities I had during/around the hackfest:
* Talked with Aleksander about modem enabling/disabling. Currently geoclue has to enable the modem itself for using it but since it doesn't know if the modem is in use by another application, it doesn't disable it after using it. This results in waste of battery power. I suggested to Aleksander that the best thing would be for ModemManager to take care of that as it knows if modem is in use or not. The alternative would be some kind of explicit UI but throwing this decision on user would be a terrible thing to do. Aleksander liked the idea and he promised to look into implementing it.
* I took part in Gtk+ roadmap discussion, mostly as a silent observer (Gtk+ hackers and designers covered it nicely so I didn't feel like saying anything) but during the meeting I learnt of a widget that was introduced in 3.12 that I had missed completely, GtkFlowBox. Since developers were unhappy that we introduced a widget that is not used by any GNOME app and I realized that use of this widget in Boxes will bring me very close to my aim of dropping libgd usage, I decided to make Boxes the first user of this widget soon.
* I realized (very late) that both my SoC studends live in Germany so I asked both of them if they can join us for any of the days. While it was impossible for baedert to join us on such short notice, Lasse was still able to make it for the last day. It was really nice to meet this very bright young fellow. We had a lot of discussion about past, present and future of Boxes. Lasse has already written a very nice and detailed blog post about that so I'll leave you with a link to that if you are interested.
* Talked with Cosimo about use of Geoclue by Endless mobile.
* Tested gnome-clang against Geoclue to provide feedback to Philip and it resulted in him fixing some important bugs.
* Talked briefly to Lennart about
* How authorization of geoclue-using apps will/can work in the kdbus world.
* The best way to allow Boxes to access USB devices with ISO9660 filesystems on them.
Thats mostly it! I would like to thank Lennart for providing me with a nice accommodation, Endocode for providing us a great venue (+ endless supply of Club mate) and GNOME foundation for sponsoring my travel.
I focused on the use of virtual machines (as thats right up my alley) for making application development as easy as possible. I talked to Christian, who has been working on an IDE for GNOME about his idea of a simulator VM which allows the developer to quickly test their app in a pristine environment. We discussed if and how Boxes can be involved. After some discussion we decided that we probably don't want to use Boxes but rather create another binary that re-uses the existing virtualization infrastructure: libvirt, qemu, spice (and maybe libosinfo) etc.
Another way to make GNOME development easy through VM would be what we already have on a very crude level: Distribution of ready-made VMs with all the development environment setup. Continuous already creates and distributes ready VM disk images of latest GNOME (almost everything from git) and Boxes can import these images. These images however are insufficient and unreliable since they do not contain any metadata, especially recommended/required system resources, about the VM. Christian recommended VMware's wmx format but that turned out to only contain metadata instead and you'd need a separate file (vmdk) for the disk image with that. What we really need here is a format that contains both metadata and all disk images in one file, in other words a virtual appliance. After doing some research on this, I once again came to the conclusion that OVF is our only hope here. Not only its one file that can contain all important aspects of a VM, its an open standard that is agreed and implemented by many different vendors. Boxes being able to import/export from/to this format and Continuous being able to provide these virtual appliances wouldn't just enable a more reliable producer-consumer relationship between Continuous and Boxes but also allow individual developers to be easily able to share their work with others: "Hey! I've been working on this project/feature X last few days and want to get some input. I'm sending you the VM, just import it in Boxes and let me know what you think..".
We've actually been wanting to have this feature for a very long time and I've mentioned the need for OVF support quite a few times so I decided its about time I do something about it. So during the hackfest, I designed the minimum interface for a library to convert from/to libvirt domain (or configuration) to/from OVF files and started the implementation too. I hope to continue working on it to have something demoable by end of this month.
Some other discussions/activities I had during/around the hackfest:
* Talked with Aleksander about modem enabling/disabling. Currently geoclue has to enable the modem itself for using it but since it doesn't know if the modem is in use by another application, it doesn't disable it after using it. This results in waste of battery power. I suggested to Aleksander that the best thing would be for ModemManager to take care of that as it knows if modem is in use or not. The alternative would be some kind of explicit UI but throwing this decision on user would be a terrible thing to do. Aleksander liked the idea and he promised to look into implementing it.
* I took part in Gtk+ roadmap discussion, mostly as a silent observer (Gtk+ hackers and designers covered it nicely so I didn't feel like saying anything) but during the meeting I learnt of a widget that was introduced in 3.12 that I had missed completely, GtkFlowBox. Since developers were unhappy that we introduced a widget that is not used by any GNOME app and I realized that use of this widget in Boxes will bring me very close to my aim of dropping libgd usage, I decided to make Boxes the first user of this widget soon.
* I realized (very late) that both my SoC studends live in Germany so I asked both of them if they can join us for any of the days. While it was impossible for baedert to join us on such short notice, Lasse was still able to make it for the last day. It was really nice to meet this very bright young fellow. We had a lot of discussion about past, present and future of Boxes. Lasse has already written a very nice and detailed blog post about that so I'll leave you with a link to that if you are interested.
* Talked with Cosimo about use of Geoclue by Endless mobile.
* Tested gnome-clang against Geoclue to provide feedback to Philip and it resulted in him fixing some important bugs.
* Talked briefly to Lennart about
* How authorization of geoclue-using apps will/can work in the kdbus world.
* The best way to allow Boxes to access USB devices with ISO9660 filesystems on them.
Thats mostly it! I would like to thank Lennart for providing me with a nice accommodation, Endocode for providing us a great venue (+ endless supply of Club mate) and GNOME foundation for sponsoring my travel.
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