The new contribution workflow for GNOME

[Posted April 7, 2017 by corbet]

The GNOME Project has announced a streamlined contribution system built around a Flatpak-based build system. "No specific distribution required. No specific version required. No dependencies hell. Reproducible, if it builds for me it will build for you. All with an UI and integrated, no terminal required. Less than five minutes of downloading plus building and you are contributing."

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 7, 2017 19:42 UTC (Fri) by kloczek (guest, #6391) [Link] (3 responses)

> "No dependencies hell"

Yep. If you you will break thermometer definitely you will be able instantly cure the fever.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 8, 2017 17:22 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

This is only about using flatpak to facilitate new contributions. Breaking the thermometer would be forcing the distributions to go to flatpak en masse, but they're unaffected.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 9, 2017 16:08 UTC (Sun) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (1 responses)

The "dependencies hell", in this context, means "building all dependencies needed to compile an application".

Flatpak allows GNOME to provide an SDK (nightly or stable) that can be used to build an application, and that does not break your own OS.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 11, 2017 8:33 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

For reference, previously contributing to GNOME meant compiling git master of loads of different components. Which means installing the needed development libraries in some cases. It's like an 3-7 day trial and error process to get started. Plus sometimes someone breaks 'git master' of one of the many components. It might even be a component GNOME depends on but doesn't maintain.

The whole process is terribly cumbersome and I wouldn't be surprised if loads of people gave up way before. You can also tell this because Google Summer of Code brings in most new contributors.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 7, 2017 20:54 UTC (Fri) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (2 responses)

I tried flatpak a few months ago and had immediate trouble because there was no dependency information between the apps and runtimes. I hope the project will revisit this decision and add some level of satisfiability constrants to the app packaging.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 7, 2017 21:06 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

That's how flatpakref files work. See examples at

http://flatpak.org/apps.html

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 9, 2017 16:12 UTC (Sun) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

That was not a case of missing dependency information: the CLI tool would not recurse through the list of runtimes and extensions. Each application distributed as Flatpak needs to specify its runtime, unless it builds everything as a bundle.

These days, you can provide "reference" files that contain a link to the repository where the runtime is stored, and the GPG key needed to validate it; the CLI and GUI tools will use that information to create a local repository where to install both the application and the runtime (plus extensions) needed to run the application.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 10, 2017 22:10 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder how they managed to make GNOME software compile in 5 minutes as opposed to the 6 hours figure they quoted. Maybe they should contribute those revolutionary advances upstream to GCC... I know a lot of Gentoo users would appreciate the speedup!

(Just to be clear, I checked the website and it does say it still *compiles* this software - I'll assume good faith that GNOME isn't lying.)

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 11, 2017 4:33 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I think that was meant to be read "less than 5 minutes downloading, plus building, and you're contributing". E.g., the building is not included in the 5 minutes.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 11, 2017 8:36 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

I read somewhere else that the person writing this forgot that he just bought a way spec'ed out machine, including his 200Mbit/s or MB/s internet connection. It should be updated to something like 15 minutes IIRC.

The new contribution workflow for GNOME

Posted Apr 13, 2017 7:39 UTC (Thu) by lamby (subscriber, #42621) [Link]

> Reproducible, if it builds for me it will build for you

Can we agree to not use the word "reproducible" to only mean "reliable" or "works on all machines"? https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/definition/ might be a good place to start.