#127 Welcome News

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 15 to December 22.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

• Adrian reworked some of homed’s internals to allow admins to change user settings without the user’s password https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30109
• Adrian made it possible to change homed passwords through AccountService https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/-/merge_requests/144?commit_id=d12301d8f7d6ee18bbc47a0825abb78fb89dfcb3#note_2214175
• Adrian experimented with making the session lock through GDM. This allows homed to throw out the encryption keys to the home directory whenever the session is locked.
• Joanie added a globally available Table Navigator to Orca https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/1a330fc42
• Joanie made a number of keybinding and key-grab code clean-up, bug fixes, and improvements
• Alice worked on bottom sheet resizing, ported message dialogs to the new system, and made it possible for dialogs to always use floating/bottom sheet presentation instead of switching automatically
• Ivan tested a new Tracy dladdr() cache for callstack sampling. While it significantly reduces contention with GJS and makes it much more viable to profile GNOME Shell with callstack sampling, it still results in a little bit of contention overhead.
• Georges pushed v2 of the USB portal
  • https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5620
  • https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1238
• Georges made the screenshot portal use GNOME Shell’s screencasting UI when available https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2999
• Julian is investigating adding scroll support to the Quick Settings popover, which would be very useful on small laptops
• Julian worked on keeping symbolic icons at their nominal size, inside a circle https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3066
• Philip made online docs for GLib/GObject/Gio use gi-docgen https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3037
• Tobias added neighboring file access to the File Chooser Dialog mockup https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/app-mockups/-/blob/master/files/file-chooser.png

GNOME Websites

Sophie (she/her) reports

Our new Welcome to GNOME site is now available via welcome.gnome.org. The page helps newcomers as well as more experienced contributors to get started with working in a new area within GNOME. The pages are currently available in Brazilian Portuguese, English, Indonesian, Russian, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Contribution instructions for apps are auto-generated with information specific to more than 90 apps. You can learn more in my introduction blog post.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield says

In Tracker SPARQL, new optimizations landed thanks to Carlos Garnacho which will significantly reduce peak memory usage and overall memory allocations during the indexing process. See the MR for full details.

Sam Thursfield reports

Carlos Garnacho landed some new functional tests in Tracker Miners that exercise failure cases in metadata extraction and potential escape routes from the sandbox. See the MR for details.

GLib

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Thomas Haller has been working hard to fix a latent race in GObject, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3769

Third Party Projects

Alain says

Planify 4.3 has been released and is available on Flathub

What’s New:

• Quick Add Improvements: Now supports project selection, due date, priority, labels and pinned.
• Sidebar filter settings: It is now possible to re-order, hide filters and the task cutter.
• Backup support: It is now possible to create a backup copy and import it from somewhere else. Planify will import all your tasks and settings.
• Offline support for Todoist: You were without internet, keep using Planify with Todoist, the tasks will be saved locally and synchronized when the connection returns.

Bug Fixed and Translations

• Russian translations thanks to @hachikoharuno.
• Fix typos in welcome project #1079 thanks to @Jaques22.
• Fixed error when displaying color in calendar events.
• Bugs fixed #1076, #1073.

Krafting announces

Hello everyone!

I’ve released version 2.0 of Playlifin, I reworked most of the code to make it less prone to errors while also adding some new features!

New features include:

• Removed the “Logs” function. Everything is logged through the console or a file
• Added a setting to turn off SSL certificate verification (So it can work with self-signed certs!)
• Added a status bar with the current progress instead of the Logs
• Added a setting to also search Video, Audio or Both (Default: Audio)
• Now using libadwaita widgets in the header bar

Now available on Flathub

Fractal

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Let’s celebrate the winter (or summer) solstice with a new Fractal beta release! Even though Fractal 5 was released only 1 month ago, development has been going at a steady pace with a few new contributors, so we want our users to benefit from our progress.

The staff’s picks:

• Restoring sessions from Secret Services other than GNOME Keyring has been fixed
• Times follow the format (12h or 24h) from the system settings
• Media history works in encrypted rooms
• The accessibility of the sidebar was improved
• More notifications settings were added, you can now set global and per-room behavior and even manage your keywords
• A bunch of refactoring, notably the port to the glib::Properties macro from gtk-rs that helped us removed almost 3000 lines of code!

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you find yourself with time to spare during these end-of-year holidays, you can always try to fix one of our issues. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Miscellaneous

Sam Thursfield says

In week 3 of the Outreachy internship around end-to-end testing, our interns Dorothy and Tanju worked on testing GNOME’s accessibility features. The following tests landed in the ‘master’ branch of the openqa-tests this week:

• a11y_seeing: Testing the “High Contrast” and “Large Text” features
• a11y_hearing: Testing the Speech Dispatcher text-to-speech system

You can see an example test run here. Several more tests are in development and will land soon. See the project board to see what is coming up!

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen reports

Save the date! GUADEC 2024 will take place in Denver, Colorado, USA and online from July 19-24. The Call for Participation and Registration will open soon, be sure to check guadec.org for those links early 2024.

For more information about GUADEC 2024, please visit the full news post: https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/12/20/guadec-2024-in-denver-colorado/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!