I speak here {^_^}

Outreachy - Week 01, Day 03!

• • • •

December 05, 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 an extremely long day (even I am still working and it’s 23:47 here). There is not much actual progress from the day though, but I definitely learnt a hell lot of new things. And there are even more left for me to just understand.

I am extremely tired now 😅, so compiling the rest of it in very short and quickly now.

  • I’m yet to learn how to use libdazzle properly (and I literally spent my whole day figuring out just this only). None of my example projects worked as intended but definitely there is a considerable progress in terms that I can understand the required code much better way now.

  • Yesterday, Though I was able to build the gnome-builder project properly, I still was facing another major issue. Whenever I tried to run the project in Builder IDE, it was not reflecting any changes that I made in the source code. Rather it always ran the same as the installed Builder IDE instance. So, there was no way for me to understand the effects, the changes in the source-code were making to the application. Lastly, I had to reach out to my mentor only for the solution. And I am quoting his reply as-it-is here.

Builder uses build profiles to build.

Check the build preferences in the builder. Click top-left button -> Build preferences and check the flatpak manifest that is being used.

Maybe the problem is the installed application name. Because if the application name is org.gnome.Builder, and it is already running, then the build run for the application under development won’t launch a new instance.

So, you can try to change the app-id property in the flatpak manifest file and use org.gnome.BuilderDevel or something like that instead.

  • Changing the app-id in the flatpak manifest file does work to a great extent for me. The build run is finally isolated from the actual installed application, but stil the changes are not being reflected. And that I am leaving for tomorrow now.

  • This whole process actually made me learn how to write basic meson.build files from scratch and then the flatpak manifest files as well. Which ultimately makes it really easy for me to understand the basic project structure, build system, runtime, external dependencies used and a lot other things.

  • I was trying to build libdazzle/example/app as an individual project, but failed. I even took danigm’s help but still I was not able to rectify the build files (which means I’m yet to learn a lot more when it comes to writing meson.build files for large projects). So, again leaving it for tommorow.

  • The best thing for the day was that I figured out another application that implements the search bar (not entirely but still something worth) as the gnome-builder’s. Gedit have a drop-down kind of search-bar that invokes with ctrl-f shortcut-keys. So, I can refer to the respective source-code for help.

  • I need to work a lot on my focus as today I spent half of the day just digging rabbit-holes for stuffs that were not needed at all. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better in terms of my work-focus.

  • Misc:

    • I spent a couple of hours rectifying ERROR: Dependency "tepl-4" not found, tried pkgconfig and cmake. I managed to get the package’s git files but the master branch has some config errors. So, no solution so far.

That’s all for today.

(And the time is 00:59 now. Will straight-away jump to bed now.)

Good night o/

Resources:

  1. Meson Tutorial (https://mesonbuild.com/Tutorial.html)
  2. Flatpak Manifests (http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/manifests.html)
  3. libdazzle example project (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libdazzle/tree/master/examples/app)

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