GNOME Hackfests

The GNOME Foundation doubled the number of hackfests GNOME contributors were able to organize and attend year over year from three hackfests to six. Hackfests are an opportunity for GNOME developers to meet face to face discuss to further a GNOME application or project. Face to face interaction can bring a high energy level not always found when doing distributed development at a global level and spurs excitement, innovation and passion. Hackfests can vary from planning and roadmap discussions to sprints to add new features or create new applications.

GTK+ Theming

The first hackfest of 2009 was GTK+ Themeing in Dublin, Ireland. Participants from GNOME included Alberto Ruiz, Benjamin Berg, Carlos Garnacho, Cody Russell, Robert Staudinger, Thomas Wood and Hagen Schink. Jens Bache-Wiig from Qt and Michael Ventnor from Mozilla also joined the hackfest. Hackfest attendees developed a common vision for GTK+ 3.0 theming and also possible integration points with Qt. Going forward it was decided that a Cairo based API and CSS format/semantics would be used for theming and the element matching. A GtkStyleContex prototype was created, libcroco, a library allowing the ability parse CSS files in the future was improved, and shaped widget support was added, helping make the GTK+ Theming Hackfest successful.

Zeitgeist

Thirteen GNOME hackers converged on Bolzano, Italy to work on the GNOME Activity Journal, and the engine that powers it, Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is an event logger, allowing it to monitor what a user does on their desktop including what documents are used, with whom the user chats with via instant messaging and what websites a user visit. GNOME Activity Journal in GNOME 3.0 will use the Zeitgeist engine to help users manage their data and activies better, such as helping a user find a file that was used on a specific day. The hackers got together in the hackfest to plan their work for GNOME 3.0 and brainstorming and implement thsoe solutions. New APIs were developed, user interface mockups were designed and worked on, collaboration with the Tracker project was discussed, and unit tests were run. The Zeitgeist hackfest was the first time key developers were able to meet and work together in the same room and everyone was grateful for the opportunity.

Video Hackfest

Collabora kindly hosted the Video hackfest in Barcelona Spain, with twelve developers meeting in the Collabora offices. Developers from multiple projects including Gstreamer, Cairo, Maemo and more met to improve the Linux desktop video experience. New feature and development, including aggressive timelines, were agreed to to improve video on the desktop with a goal of making it into the next round of distribution releases. It was agreed to switch Gstreamer to Cairo for the default video transport model, a Mesa GLX extension was proposed and code was written to improve threading models, and a number of Cairo APIs were improved. Users should see video playback improvement from some distributions starting in early 2010.

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