Coder's Log

What makes for a good maintainer? Although I do not know of a definite answer to this important but vague and controversial  question, maintaining various free software projects over the last many years, I've been learning some lessons on how to strive to be a good maintainer; some self-taught through experience, some from my colleagues (especially our awesome GNOME designers) and some from my GSoC students. I wanted to share these lessons with everyone so I arranged a small BoF at GUADEC and thought it would be nice to share it on planet GNOME as well. Some points only apply to UIs here, some only to libraries (or D-Bus service or anything with a public API really) and some to any kind of project. Here goes: Only accept use cases There are no valid feature requests without a proper use case behind them. What's a proper use case you ask? In my opinion, it's based on what the user needs, rather than what they desire or think they need. "I want a button X tha...

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...

Like many others on planet.gnome, it seems I also don't feel like posting much on my blog any more since I post almost all major events of my life on social media (or SOME, as its for some reason now known as in Finland). To be honest, the thought usually doesn't even occur to me anymore. :( Well, anyway! Here is a brief of what's been up for the last many months: Got divorced. Yeah, not nice at all but life goes on! At least I got to keep my lovely cat. Its been almost an year (14 days less) that I moved to London. In a way it was good that I was in a new city at the time of divorce as its an opportunity to start a new life. I made some cool new friends, mostly the GNOME gang in here. London has its quirks but over all I'm pretty happy to be living here. One big issue is that most of my friends are in Finland so I miss them very much. Hopefully, in time I'll also make a lot more friends in London and also my friends from Finland will visit me too. The best thin...

So its that time of the year! GUADEC is always loads of fun and meeting all those the awesome GNOME contributors in person and listening to their exciting stories and ideas gives me a renewed sense of motivation. I have two regular talks this year: Boxes: All packed & ready to go? Geo-aware OS: Are we there yet? Apart from that I also intend to present a lightning talk titled "Examples to follow". This talk will present stories of few of our awesome GNOME contributors and what we all can learn from them.

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...

So the Location hackfest 2014 took place at the awesome Mozilla offices in London during last weekend. Even though some of the important participants didn't manage to be physically present, enough people did: John Layt (KDE) Hanno Schlichting (Mozilla) Mattias Bengtsson (GNOME) Jonas Danielsson (GNOME) and some participated remotely: Bastien Nocera (GNOME) Garvan Keeley (Mozilla) Unfortunately Aaron McCarthy of Jolla couldn't attend remotely either as he lives in a very incompatible timezone (AU) but we had a lot of productive discussion with him through email that still continues. Some very fruitful discussions we had: Why Mozilla doesn't make wifi data it gathers for its location service , available for everyone to download? Hanno explained in great detail how making this data available would seriously compromise privacy and even safety of people. One good example given was someone getting out of an abusive relationship and not wanting to be traceable by the...