Hackweek 24

danigm — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:00:00 +0100

It's the time for a new Hack Week. The Hack Week 24 was from November 18th to November 22th, and I've decided to join the New openSUSE-welcome project this time.

The idea of this project is to revisit the existing openSUSE welcome app, and I've been trying to help here, specifically for the GNOME desktop installation.

openSUSE-welcome

Right now after installing any openSUSE distribution with a graphical desktop, the user is welcomed on first login with a custom welcome app.

This custom application is a Qt/QML with some basic information and useful links.

The same generic application is used for all desktops, and for popular desktops right now exists upstream applications for this purpose, so we were talking on Monday morning about it and decided to use specific apps for desktops.

So for GNOME, we can use the GNOME Tour application.

gnome-tour

GNOME Tour is a simple rust/gtk4 application with some fancy images in a slideshow.

This application is generic and just shows information about GNOME desktop, so I created a fork for openSUSE to do some openSUSE specific customization and use this application as openSUSE welcome in GNOME desktop for Tumbleweed and Leap.

Desktop patterns, the welcome workflow

After some testing and investigation about the current workflow for the welcome app:

x11_enhanced pattern recommends opensuse-welcome app.
We can add a Recommends: gnome-tour to the gnome pattern
The application run using xdg autostart, so gnome-tour package should put the file in /etc/xdg/autostart and set to hidden on close.
In the case of having a system with multiple desktops, we can choose the specific welcome app using the OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn config in desktop file

So I've created a draft PR to do not show the openSUSE-welcome app in GNOME, and I've also the gnome-tour fork in my home OBS project.

I've been testing this configuration in Tumbleweed with GNOME, KDE and XFCE installed and it works as expected. The openSUSE-welcome is shown in KDE and XFCE and the gnome-tour app is only shown in GNOME.

Next steps

The next steps to have the GNOME Tour app as default welcome for openSUSE GNOME installation are:

Send forked gnome-tour package to GNOME:Next project in OBS.
Add the Recommends: gnome-tour to patterns-gnome to GNOME:Next project in OBS.
Make sure that any other welcome application is not shown in GNOME.
Review openQA tests that expect opensuse-welcome and adapt for the new application.

Hackweek 23

danigm — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Hack Week is the time SUSE employees experiment, innovate & learn interruption-free for a whole week! Across teams or alone, but always without limits.

The Hack Week 23 was from November 6th to November 10th, and my project was to gvie some love to the GNOME Project.

Before the start of the Hack week I asked in the GNOME devs Matrix channel, what project needs some help and they gave me some ideas. At the end I decided to work on the GNOME Calendar, more specifically, improving the test suite and fixing issues related to timezones, DST, etc.

GNOME Calendar

GNOME Calendar is a Gtk4 application, written in C, that heavily uses the evolution-data-server library. It's a desktop calendar application with a modern user interface that can connect handle local and remote calendars. It's integrated in the GNOME desktop.

The current gnome-calendar project has some unit tests, using the GLib testing framework. But right now there are just a few tests, so the main goal right now is to increase the number of tests as much as possible, to detect new problems and regressions.

Testing a desktop application is not something easy to do. The unit tests can check basic operations, structures and methods, but the user interaction and how it's represented is something hard to test. So the best approach is to try replicate user interactions and check the outputs.

A more sophisticated approach could be to start to use the accessibility stack in tests, so it's possible to verify the UI widgets output without the need of rendering the app.

With gnome-calendar there's another point of complexity for tests because it relies on the evolution-data-server to be running, the app communicates with it using dbus, so to be able to do more complex tests we should mock the evolution-data-server and we should create fake data for testing.

My contribution

By the end of the week I've created four Merge requests, three of them have been merged now, and I'll continue working on this project in the following weeks/months.

I'm happy with the work that I was able to do during this Hack Week. I've learned a bit about testing with GLib in C, and a lot about the evolution-data-server, timezones and calendar problems.

It's just a desktop calendar application, how hard it could be? Have you ever deal with dates, times and different regions and time zones? It's a nightmare. There are a lot of edge cases working with dates that can cause problems, operations with dates in different time zones, changes in dates for daylight saving, if I've an event created for October 29th 2023 at 2:30 it will happens two times?

A lot of problems could happen and there are a lot of bugs reported for gnome-calendar related to this kind of issues, so working on this is not something simple, it requires a lot of edge case testing and that's the plan, to cover most of them with automated tests, because any small change could lead to a bug related to time zones that won't be noticed until someone has an appointment at a very specific time.

And this week was very productive thanks to the people working on gnome-calendar. Georges Stavracas reviews my MR very quickly and it was possible to merge during the week, and Jeff Fortin does a great work with the issues in gitlab and leading me to most relevant bugs.

So after a week of going deep into the gnome-calendar source code it could be a pity to just forget about it, so I'll try to keep the momentum and continue working on this project, of course, I'll have just a few hours per week, but any contribution is better than nothing. And maybe for the next summer I can propose a Google Summer of Code project to get an intern working on this full time.

danigm.net - hackweek