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Hackfests 2014-15

Article describing hackfests in the 2014 financial year (Oct 2013 - Sept 2014).

Should be around 600-800 words.

Article

GNOME gets loads of love from people all around the world, and when these contributors and users come together to hack on the projects close to their hearts, the outcome is magical. GNOME contributors collaborate, connect, and celebrate their valuable contributions all the while paving the path for the next GNOME release. Here are some glimpses into what we have achieved in 2013-14.

WebKitGTK+ - A Coruña, Galicia, Spain

The fifth edition of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest was the largest to date. A variety of things were worked on during the hackfest, including Wayland support for WebKit2 and WebKitGTK+, design and functional improvements to GNOME Web, porting the build system to CMake, as well as improving the integration of the new Web Inspector with WebKitGTK+.

Docs - Norwich, UK

The Documentation hackfest brought brand new features in Yelp, the start screen's design overhaul, and several bug fixes. Evolution's user docs were consolidated, System Monitor docs were rewritten and updated, getting started pages were integrated on the GNOME web site, and a feature to have stable documents directly updated from git branches was added. Tons of bugs were fixed in several docs. Moreover, discussion with newcomers resulted in the “GNOME Project Health” webpage that lists the activity of GNOME projects along with their primary languages.

GStreamer - Munich, Germany

This exciting two days hackfest made progress on both the framework and application side. On the framework side, OpenGL Plugins were integrated into the GStreamer Plugins-Bad Module, a new torrent based streaming source was introduced, many plugins were improved, a new device probing API got merged, and a prototype for better tracing infrastructure was created. On the application side, several bugs were investigated for the Pitivi video editor, the Transmageddon transcoder tool, and GNOME Sound Recorder.

Translation - Paris, France

A whopping 1962 strings and 1238 strings were translated in GNOME 3.12 UI & GNOME 3.12 Docs, respectively. Preview apps, parts of GNOME extra, and release notes, were also translated. The translation team worked very hard to reduce the review queue. Several French l10n bugs were fixed. The hackfest also inspired several newcomers to contribute, which led to several fixes in the wiki.

Freedesktop Summit - Nürnberg, Germany

Developers from the KDE, GNOME, Unity, and Razor-qt projects met at Freedesktop Summit to improve collaboration among themselves by discussing improvements to the freedesktop specifications. Presentations and discussions occurred regarding D-Bus specifications for app launching kdbus, a replacement for X11-based startup notification, desktop actions, splash screens on low end hardware, icon theme related simplifications, a full-fledged shared inhibition API, faster desktop file cache, and more. Requirements for a filesystem notification and mime applications specification to setup per-desktop default applications were written. Startup notification specs were updated. A number of bugs was fixed in shared-mime-info. Moreover, specs were also updated on the freedesktop.org website.

West Coast Summit - San Francisco, USA

West Coast Summit was a hackfest in the form of a conference, a good amount of work was done on GTK+ on Wayland, application sandboxing, KDBus, Glade, and several internal modules. Foundational development for Builder, the IDE specific made for GNOME development, was also started. A lot of improvements brought more responsiveness, and less memory usage by GNOME Shell and other JS apps, along with several bug fixes.

Developer Experience - Berlin, Germany

This hackfest focused on both dev tools & documentation for a better developer experience. The attendees split into two groups. The first group tackled GTK+ planning, roadmap for new widgets, and capabilities and dev tools. The second group improved app development docs including the GNOME developer website, API reference documentation, and tutorials. Substantial work was done for GNOME HIG and GTK+ API consistency, touch support, better Glade support, different profiles in Devhelp, simulator VM to test GNOME apps, and gnome-clang. developer.gnome.org, API reference documentation UI was also updated.

Location - London, UK

This hackfest was a great example of how GNOME technology influences several projects. At the Mozilla office in central London, Geoclue2 was discussed among GNOME, KDE, Jolla and Mozilla developers. A new GeoClue2 based plugin to QtLocation was created. Mozilla Location Service's development plans were also shared, while attendees scanned and contributed location data using mozstumbler for the entire hackfest. Moreover, designs for location in GNOME 3.14 was discussed and implemented.

Open Help Conference - Cincinnati, USA

Following the OpenHelp conference, members of the GNOME documentation team worked on updating the user help for the GNOME 3.12 release. The overall structure of the guide was completely reworked and the index page for the guide was redesigned. The restructured System Administration Guide now features multiple groups for settings. An additional input format for Mallard-based documentation, called Duck pages, that doesn’t use the often distracting XML syntax, was also planned to be included.

Evince - Strasbourg, France

Just days before GUADEC, some GNOME contributors gathered in Strasbourg to improve the GNOME document reader, Evince. The hackfest brought together members of the GNOME Accessibility team and Evince developers, making further improvements to Evince's accessibility support. They accomplished tiling support to allow infinite zoom, improvements in comics back-end, inclusion of Recent View, and several UI improvements. Two Google Summer of Code students also hacked on free text annotations & highlighting annotation.

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Editor/Reviewer Notes

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Removed sections that were covered in previous years (-Nuritzi):

GNOME Summit - Montréal, Canada

Already covered last year!

In 2013, the GNOME Summit took place in Montréal, Canada, reflecting the strong support for free software in the region. The Summit was once again very productive. GNotification support in GTK+ was completed, and there was some brainstorming on the design and functionality of GNOME Boxes. A11y regressions were fixed, and some plans were made to ensure more proper a11y support in GNOME under Wayland. A newcomer's tutorial was held for students attending the Summit and they were able to take advantage of hands-on assistance from experienced GNOME developers. Significant progress was made by these students on Mousetrap, a helpful technology for people who are unable to use a mouse.

.NET + GNOME - Vienna, Austria

Already covered last year!

The aim of this hackfest was to get our suite of .NET based GNOME applications ported to the GNOME3 ecosystem. A substantial amount of work was done to port Banshee, Pinta, SparkleShare, and Tomboy to GTK#3. Also, some work was done in creating versions of Tomboy for Android and OS X, as well as updating the GTK#3 bindings to support GTK+ 3.10.

Dia GNOME 2013 - Temuco, Chile

Already covered last year in Conferences section!

The seventh edition of GNOME Day was held in Temuco, Chile on November 9, 2013, with a spectacular turnout. The main topics included the latest GNOME release, Ubuntu Gnome, how to write bug reports using Bugzilla, and how to write apps with PyGobjects and more. Other activities also took place including “Olimpiadas GNOME” (GNOME Olympics), a sporting event and “Guess the Movie”, an entertaining trivia event where the winners received GNOME t-shirts and stickers.

Next Steps

Proofreading complete. Need to select and include pictures.

2024-10-23 11:05