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...

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the 4th GNOME+Rust hackfest in Thessaloniki, Greece. While other folks were mainly focused on the infrastructure work , with my Rust being extremely rusty as of late, I decided to do something that tests the infra instead. More specifically, I took up on Sebastian's challenge of "Maybe someone should write a gst-inspect replacement in Rust". I am happy to report that by the end of the hackfest, I already have an implementation that covers 30% of the typical usage of gst-inspect. This implementation also comes pre-built with paging by default (which I only recently added to the current gst-inspect) and colored output ( MR on existing gst-inspect still pending review). I did run into some rather interesting issues though but there was always someone who could help me out. One specific one was on how best to pipe the output in Rust to a pager. This took more than a day and my implementation was mostly very similar to the one I ...

Just wanted to announce release 2.5.0 of Geoclue that includes the changes I mentioned in my last blog post . Also, while I'm at it, I wanted to highlight the "call for help" at the end of that post by repeating it here again. I apologize of repeating to those who already read it but a friend pointed out that it's likely going to be missed by many folks: The future of Mozilla Location Service When Mozilla announced their location service in late 2013, Geoclue became one of its first users as it was our only hope for a reliable WiFi-geolocation source. We couldn't use Google's service as their ToC don't allow it to be used in an open source project (I recall some clause that it can only be used with Google Maps and not any other Map software). Mozilla Location Service (MLS) was a huge success in terms of people contributing WiFi data to it. I've been to quite a few places around Europe and North America in the last few years and I haven...

After I started working for Collabora in April, I've finally been able to put some time on maintenance and development of Geoclue again. While I've fixed quite a few issues on the backlog, there has been some significant changes as of late, that I felt deserves some highlighting. Hence this blog post. Leaving security to where it belongs   Since people's location is a very sensitive piece of information, security of this information had been the core part of Geoclue2 design. The idea was (and still is) to only allow apps access to user's location with their explicit permission (that they could easily revoke later). When Geoclue2 was designed and then developed, we didn't have Flatpak . Surely, people were talking about the need for something like Flatpak but even with those ideas, it wasn't clear how location access will be handled. Hence we decided for geoclue to handle this itself, through an external app authorizing agent and implemented such an agent ...

Earlier this month, a few of us from Collabora, Olivier Crête, Nicolas Dufresne, George Kiagiadakis and I attended the GStreamer Spring Hackfest in Lund, Sweden. Hosted by  Axis Communications (who uses GStreamer in their surveillance cameras for many years now), it was a great opportunity for the GStreamer community to touch base and work on open bugs and pet projects. While I've been involved in the GStreamer project in the past, it was my first GStreamer hackfest. While a lot was achieved during the event, the most exciting outcomes were no doubt the closing of more than 350 bugs, and the agreement on a transition plan to move to GitLab. Overall, the hackfest was very productive, with each member of our team managing to progress in their list of tasks while all taking part in bug triaging & cleaning in preparation of moving GStreamer's issue tracking to GitLab. George spent time working on improving the new library API that is needed to introduce...

Last Thursday was my last day at Kinvolk . While Kinvolk is a great company run by very nice and talented folks and I really hoped to work there for a very long time, unfortunately it turned out to be not the best fit for me. While I am sad to leave, I am also very excited to join Collabora in their multimedia team. Today is my first day there. Since Collabora does not exist in Germany, I will be working for them as a consultant and had to register my own one-man company. Yes, I will be staying in Berlin and work from home. I have known Collabora from its very early days, when it was just a few developers with a vision and passion for Open Source. I also worked very closely with Collabora over the years during the good old Nokia Maemo/Meego times. I always had great appreciation for their work and commitment to Open Source, which is a huge challenge for a consulting company. While I do not yet know which specific projects I will be involved in at Collabora, I'm most likely ...