danigm.net - hackfest

Fractal December'18 Hackfest (part 2)

danigm — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100

The Friday 14th was the last day of the second Fractal Hackfest. I've not spend much time writing real code, the Thursday was mainly another hacking day and I've been able to continue with the fractal-backend creation, but there's a lot of work to do there.

But the hackfest was really productive, we've talked about big issues, project management, some design ideas, new functionalities, the application refactor, etc.

GNOME newcomers experience

We talked about how to improve the GNOME newcomers experience and how to improve the main view of Fractal. I think that Tobias will talk more about this, he was working in some cool design for this and I think we can start to implement this new views soon.

Best practices

We've been developing Fractal in a fast way, without spend a lot of time thinking about the code quality, maintainability and that stuff. Recently we've set the rustfmt linter in the CI pipeline and we've some tests, but the Merge Requests process wasn't defined and for example I was pushing directly to master.

To improve the quality of Fractal we've started a new wiki page to have a list of best practices to follow. There we'll add some guidances on how we should write code and the processes to follow to improve Fractal.

We've decided that we should be more strict with the Merge Request code review and now, direct push to master is not allowed, all changes will go through the review process. We should wait at least two days to merge something and have at least two people that approve the change.

This will slow down the MR process, but will improve the code quality and will reduce regressions. Any help is welcome, if you're able to test the MR, you can leave a comment and other reviewers will have more confident in the change.

We're also working in the code quality using the cargo clippy tool. There's a Merge Request waiting for review, so we'll have a better rust source code soon.

Fractal is now in the GNOME group

The Fractal project was on the World group inside the GNOME gitlab. Fractal is a GNOME application, the most active developers are GNOME developers and we try to follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

Fractal is one of the first new applications that born just during the gitlab migration so we go through a new process. At first Fractal was in my personal gitlab under /danigm/fractal then we move to the World group under /World/fractal and finally we're in the main GNOME group /GNOME/fractal.

New release 4.0.0

The last release was the 3.30.0, more than three months has passed since this release and we've a lot of changes so we want to provide a new stable release.

We discuss a bit about the version number that we should follow and we decided that we should do use our own version number system, because we want to release as much as possible, when we've important changes.

We're working in the 4.0.0 release, we're stabilizing and fixing important bugs before the release and maybe we can have the new release during the next week.

So I've spend the last day looking for bugs and preparing the new release.

Matrix Live

We've a meeting with the people from Matrix.org to talk about Fractal and the hackfest. You can view the full interview in youtube:

Friday sponsored lunch

We've a sponsored lunch the Friday 14th, the local group Plan4D invite us to a great lunch in the city center.

After that, I goes back to my home and leave the other people there in Seville doing some tourism, I've to go back to Málaga.

The hackfest was great and we have done a lot of things. This was the second Fractal hackfest in 2018, and we meet at the GUADEC too. We've had two GSoC students and now we've another intern thanks to the outreachy program. There's a lot of people contributing to Fractal and that's great.

GNOME is a great community and I think that Matrix.org and Rust are helping to this project a lot. The Matrix.org people are supporting us, indeed, Matthew comes to the first hackfest and I think that the success of Fractal and the community behind has a lot to thank to the Rust language and to the people working in the Rust + GNOME integration, Gtk-rs is a great project.

I want to apologize about the network problem during the hackfest. We've been working all days thank to Julian network sharing, with eduroam, because we aren't able to have guest access in the university.

The university has a strict internet connection filtering, so only a professor can ask for a guest connection for events and we do the request too late.

Fractal December'18 Hackfest (part 1)

danigm — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100

First two days of work

The Tuesday 11th started the second Fractal Hackfest. I've organized this hackfest in Seville, the city where I studied computer science and here I've a lot of friends in the University so is a good place to do it here.

The weather was important too for the hackfest selection, in December Seville is a good choice because the weather is not too cold, we're having sunny days.

The first day was a good day, thinking about some relevant issues and planning what we want to do. We talked about the work needed for the interface split, about the E2EE support, new features and the need for a new release.

We're having some problems with the internet connection, because the University has a restricted network policy and we ask for the guess internet connection the Monday, but we're still waiting.

Meantime we have to thanks to Julian Sparber the hackfest wifi, because he's using his laptop to stream the eduroam connection.

Newcomers

The first day we try to promote as a newcomers day, and some people comes. We've some contributions and I spend some time trying to help people to introduce to the GNOME community.

GNOME Foundation sponsored dinner

The GNOME Foundation payed for a Fractal dev day dinner, so we should thanks this great dinner to GNOME:

We've a good time eating and drinking in the Coco Verde. We talk about GNOME, the desktop, matrix.org and other communication tools.

Hacking day

Today was a hacking day, so we started to work in the stuff that we talk about yesterday. We've resolved some minor issues and I started with the fractal-backend crate.

We talked about move all the app data model and logic to the fractal-backend and leave fractal-gtk only as UI management.

We talked about the LMDB use to store rooms and messages and we decided that the best solution should be to use a relational database, because we've relations and with the key-value thing we'll end creating those relations and maintaining by hand. In any case, I've this decision in mind and I'm implementing all this with a trait to hide the storage detail so we can change easily in the future.

So today I've spend a lot of time implementing this trait and a first implementation for the Room struct. I've decided to use rusqlite instead the diesel orm because I want to keep it simple.

I want to finish all the database storage and move the AppOp main loop to the fractal-backend and try to update the fractal-gtk to use the backend instead the AppOp struct to get the rooms and messages. But maybe is a lot of work, I don't know if I'll be able to finish this before the end of the hackfest.

Thanks

This hackfest is possible because there's a lot of volunteer work and people helping us. First of all, the Fractal core team that comes Tobias Bernard, Julian Sparber and Alexandre Franke and of course the GNOME Foundation. And also we've to thank Alejandro Domínguez, a newcomer that is doing a really good job fixing bugs and cleaning some old code.

Then I want to thank the Linux local group, SUGUS for the help and also I want to thank to other free software related group Plan4D.

Plan4D is giving us some help with the place and cookies, fruits, juices and some tea.

And finally I want to thank again to my coworkers in wadobo because they support me to spend a full work week working in gnome and they also spend some time helping us to organize all the hackfest stuff.