Notes from Day 1 of the Hackfest

• Flatpak discussions

  • FlatHub?

    • 3rd party developers

    • security/perception of security - downloading flatpakrefs from GitHub doesn't look nice

    • how much effort can be committed to have a Minimum Viable Product
    • how do we position this work?
      • is it GNOME?
      • or is it freedesktop?
    • legal/liabilities
• GTK4/GSK discussions
  • Rendering, current state:
    • vulkan: text is all fallback, we need a texture atlas for this
    • gl: is all fallback, has not been kept up with vulkan changes
  • there was bunch of discussion of what apis applications want to use for animations and complex content rendering vs what gtk itself uses
  • decision: we will not use component alpha

  • for text, we need to implement a PangoRenderer. We can steal a lot of the cogl code which already does this

  • glyph caching should live in gsk
  • the widget create pango context function needs to return a different pango context
  • some talk about invalidations and how to make them faster
  • Input:
    • Getting rid of subwindows, how ?
• Schedule/Roadmap discussion
  • We want to do a 3.90 release at this point
  • Clear messaging is important:
    • work in progress
    • known gaps: pango-cogl, gl renderer not up to part to vulkan
    • application can try porting and provide feedback, but can't rely on stability yet
• Stuff that should be gone in gtk4 but isn't yet
  • too many ways to handle key events, but no event controller

• AppStream categories in GNOME Software

  • Categories are copied from the app's .desktop file

  • Endless currently has manually curated app descriptions ("Web browser", "Video player") rather than categories as such - somewhere between AppStream summary and categories

  • Some difference of opinion on whether Desktop Menu Specification categories are suitable for an "app store" UI
    • The menu spec is intended for a hierarchical menu (e.g. Windows, GNOME 2) which is falling out of favour in some GUIs even for app-launching
      • it was asserted that an entry has to have exactly one "main category" (but smcv cannot find a reference for this in the actual spec)

      • various other rules like Audio and Video each implying AudioVideo (which really means "something to do with multimedia")

      • for an "app store" we probably want tags rather than a hierarchy
      • vendors (distro, app store curator, whoever) are free to introduce X- categories if they need to - smcv's automotive project is making use of this for categories that wouldn't make sense on desktop or are called for by a particular vendor's UX

    • Creating a new taxonomy seems undesirable because https://xkcd.com/927/

  • Plans to have a way to specify categories directly in the appdata XML, overriding the app's, in case the app's are not sufficiently representative
  • Keywords were mentioned as a possible basis for categorization, but those are not really suitable: they are very much for search