I speak here {^_^}

Outreachy - Week 01, Day 02!

• • • •

December 04, 2019

Task for the week:

  • Try to replicate the gnome-builder “search and replace bar” widget (just the wire-frame) in the Gtranslator project.

Progress of the day:

  • Today was a slightly more productive day. I was able to fix yesterday’s build-environment errors early in the morning itself, so the rest of the day was saved from all that hassle and I was free to tweak the source-code now. What I learned from all that environment-related mess (I created yesterday) is:

    • I should have stopped yesterday early enough only. Because what I needed most was a fresh approach today. The reason why I am stating it here is that repeating a wrong approach over and over again just results in nothing. Yesterday, I was just repeating the same process almost for the whole day. I was exhausted enough after staring at the screen (at those endless build reports ending just into failure every time) that my mind had stopped working (almost) entirely. I was not able to figure out my smallest mistakes even. For instance, for the whole time, I was cloning gnome-builder source code from salsa.debian.org instead of doing it from gitlab.gnome.org and was wondering why it didn’t work for me 🤦. (See, this happens when one over-exerts something).

    • I should ask more frequently when I am sure by myself that I have tried enough solutions for the problem and none of them worked for me. Because even the smallest leads from the mentor accelerate the whole process by 100x. For instance, I informed danigm last night that so-so was the scenario and I was not able to fix it. And he, telling me that I should try building it from the last-stable branch, just cleared everything. Even that was another piece of learning for the day and I felt much more confident while solving the further errors I had during the process. (Yes, I was able to build both the projects from the master branch as well later on. 😄)

    • And lastly admitting early enough that a solution which seems wrong could be wrong, creates more chance of leading quickly towards the alternative right solutions.

  • The next step for today was to try adding “search and replace bar” related snippets of code from the gnome-builder project into gtranslator. And in no time, I got another error for the missing run-time dependency ‘libdazzle-1.0`. This time I knew what this dependency was for but again had no idea how to add it inside the project.

  • After reading for a while, I realized that most of these run-time dependencies come packed inside the available runtimes itself. So, the only criteria for deciding a runtime for a project is evaluating the kind of dependencies, the project is going to use and then analyzing which runtime comes bundled with them.

  • But again, (AFAIR but I might be wrong also) the libdazzle-1.0 is not bundled in any of the available runtimes. So, the next step was to search for how these unbundled dependencies could be added to a project. I didn’t find any good documentation for the same, therefore, the last step was to read the source-code of gnome-builder itself and check how libdazzle-1.0 was added there (the best part was that gnome-builder is the only project that implements it primarily, so I was staright away to the solution). After an hour or so, I finally find out how it was done. And voila, I was one more step ahead in the process 🙌. The solution was:

  # Dependencies #
  . . .

  dependency('libdazzle-1.0', version: '>= 3.33.90')
  . . .

– meson.build

 "modules" : [

        . . .

        {
            "name" : "libdazzle",
            "config-opts" : [
                "--libdir=/app/lib",
                "--buildtype=release"
            ],
            "buildsystem" : "meson",
            "builddir" : true,
            "cleanup" : [
                "/bin"
            ],
            "sources" : [
                {
                    "type" : "git",
                    "url" : "https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libdazzle.git",
                    "branch" : "libdazzle-3-34"
                }
            ]
        },

       . . .
]

–build-aux/flatpak/org.gnome.Gtranslator.json

  • Besides, I wrote a simple python script to quickly create my daily Outreachy post templates (same as today’s post) so that I could essentially cut out the time to prep a markdown template every day, just to start the post. Hopefully, it will save me lots of time which unneccesarily goes into thinking about “how to start” and “how to proceed”.

That’s all for today.

Till tomorrow. o/

Other posts