Coder's Log

zbus As many of the readers already know, for the past (almost) 2 years, I've been developing a Rust-crate for D-Bus, called zbus . With this being my first big Rust project to start from scratch done almost entirely in my spare time, the progress was rather slow for many months. My perfectionism didn't help much with the progress either but also the fact that implementing a Serde API for the D-Bus format was quite challenging. Then along came my old friend and ex-colleague, Marc-André Lureau who sped up the progress 10 times and soon after we had the 1.0 release of zbus. While my original plan (perfectionism again) was for the API to be primarily async, with the synchronous API mostly just a wrapper around it, it was Marc-Andre who ended up doing most of the work and coming up with nice high-level API and his use case was primarily synchronous so we decided to go with synchronous API first. I still believe that was the right thing to do, since neither of us were fam

While I'm known as a Vala fanboy in GNOME, I've tried to stress time and again that I see Vala as more a practical solution than an ideal one. "Safe programming" has always been something that intrigued me, having dealt with numerous crashes and other hard-to-debug runtime issues in the past. So when I first heard of Rust some years back, it got me super excited but it was not exactly stable  and there was no integration with GNOME libraries or D-Bus and hence it was not at all a viable option for developing desktop code. Lately (in past 2 years) things have significantly changed. Not only we have Rust 1.0 but we also have crates that provide integration with GNOME libraries and D-Bus . On top of that, some of us took steps to start converting some C code into Rust and many of us started seriously talking with Rust hackers to make Rust a first class programming language for GNOME. To make things really go foward, we decided to arrange a hackfest , which took place

After writing the blog post about the new Geoclue convenience library , I felt that while the helper API was really simple for single-shot usage, it still wasn't as simple as it should be for most applications, that would need to monitor location updates. They'll still need to make async calls (they could do it synchronously too but that is hardly ever a good idea) to create proxy for location objects on location updates. So yesterday, I came up with even simpler API that should make interacting with Geoclue as simple as possible. I'll demonstrate through some gjs code that simply awaits for location updates forever and prints the location on console each time there is a location update: const Geoclue = imports.gi.Geoclue; const MainLoop = imports.mainloop; let onLocationUpdated = function(simple) { let location = simple.get_location (); print("Location: " + location.latitude + "," + location.longitude); }; let onSimple

Apart from many fixes, Geoclue recently gained some new features as well. Sharing location from phones If you read planet GNOME , you must have seen my GSoC student, Ankit already posting about this . Basically his work enabled Geoclue to search for, and make use of any NMEA providers on the local network. The second part of this project, involved implementation of such a service for Android devices. I'm pleased that he managed to get the project working in time and even went the extra mile to fix issues with his code, after GSoC. This is useful since GPS-based location from android is almost always going to be more accurate than WiFi-based one (assuming neighbouring WiFi networks are covered by Mozilla Location Service ). This is especially useful for desktop machines since they typically do not have even WiFi hardware on them and have until now been limited to GeoIP, which at best gives city-level accurate location. This feature was included in release 2.3.0 and

Soon after I mentioned the need for an oFono -backend in Geoclue in my blog , Sri kindly helped me get in touch with oFono developers. What started as a nice friendly discussion soon was turned into a not so nice discussion. I won't get into details and blames but here is what I found out about the project:  oFono developers claim that its is still a maintained project while rest of the world think its a dead project, even people who love the project. Last release being in 2012 and loads of missing essential features (see rest of the points below) and link to mailing-list broken (even though I pointed it out 3 weeks ago and its been broken for much longer) on the homepage all points to the fact that its essentially a dead project. No proper D-Bus introspection nor any client libraries. This already makes it extremely difficult to work with oFono but wait there is more hurdles on the way. No online cross-references documentation: The documentation link on the home-page l