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

Hackfests/GTK2017/Day1 (last edited 2017-03-23 19:48:08 by SimonMcVittie)