GNOME Outreachy mentorship

The Outreachy program is a three month internship to work in FOSS. There are two periods for the outreachy, the first one from December to March and the other one from May to August. It's similar to the Google Summer Of Code, but in this case the interns doesn't need to be students.

I proposed some ideas for interts to work on GNOME, with me as a mentor. I wrote three proposals this time:

  • Extend Fractal media viewer with video support and explore video conference
  • Create Gtranslator initial integration with Damned Lies
  • Books : Improve the epub support in gnome-books

There was people interested in all of three projects, but for the Books app we don't have any real contribution so there was no real applicants.

I've two good proposals for Fractal and for Gtranslator, so I approve both and the Outreachy people approve these two interts. So we get two new devs working in GNOME for three months as interns.

This is something great, paid developers working in my proposals is a good thing, but this implies that I need to do the mentor work for these two interns during the three months period, so it's more work for me :/

But I think this is a really important work to do to bring more people to the free software, so I've less time for hacking, but I think it's good, because the fresh blood can do the hacking and if, after the Outreachy, one of the interns continues collaborating with GNOME, that will be more important for the GNOME project that some new features in one app.

GNOME Translation Editor

Teja is the intern working in gtranslator. She is working in the Damned Lies integration.

Damned Lies is a web application for GNOME translators. This app provides updated .po file for each GNOME module and language and translators can download and update that file using the web interface. That web is able to do the commit to the original repository with the upload version from translators.

The idea is to provide a simple integration with this platform in the GNOME Translation Editor app, using the web json API to be able to open .po files from the web directly without the need to download the file and then open it.

The current API of DL is really simple so we can't implement a real integration without adding more functionality to this API. So this project requires some work in the DL app too.

In the future we can improve the integration adding the posibility to upload the new .po after saving to DL so translators doesn't need to go to the web interface and can do all the translation flow using only the Translation Editor.

Fractal

Maira is the intern working in Fractal. They are working in the initial video preview widget.

Fractal is a instant messaging app that works over matrix.org. Currently we support different types of messages, like text, images, audio and files. But for video we're using the same widget as we're using for files, so you can download or open, but we've not a preview or inline player.

The main idea of this project is to provide a simple video player using gstreamer to play the video inside the Fractal app.

This is not an easy task, because we're using Rust in Fractal and we need to deal with bindings and language stuff, but I think it's doable.

During the internship, Maira is also working fixing some bugs in the audio player, becuase it uses gstreamer too, so during the code review, Maira detected some problems and they are fixing it.

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