I speak here {^_^}

Outreachy - Week 02, Day 03!

• • • •

December 11, 2019

Task for the week:

  • Try to replicate the gnome-builder “search and replace bar” widget (just the wire-frame) in the Gtranslator project.
    • [sub-task] First try doing the above task in a seperate simple application.

Progress of the day:

  • It was again a day full of learning new things. Although, there is no tangible progress even now but certainly I’m taking a step or two ahead everyday.

  • Today, I learnt a (considerably) accurate way of isolating build environments of the development and installed instances of a same application. Now, rather than changing the app-id (which I realised is not the recommended way because of the file naming convention across a project. Some files such as .desktop files, export files etc. includes the app-id in their names itself) but by adding some special command line arguments in the flatpak manifests i.e "x-run-args" : ["--standalone", "-vvvv"].

    • Adding the --standalone argument will make the development application run with G_APPLICATION_NON_UNIQUE flag. That means the application is isolated at most part.

    • The only thing that require more tweaking for isolation is the “name of the application on the session bus”. It is the case when the application is involved in IPC (which is the scenario in my case, so, it didn't help me much but I learnt something new and important. I managed to get the changes reflected in the build run. Yay \o/)

(you might need to read some of the previous day’s blogs to understand the context of my above point.)

  • I have started creating search-and-replace-bar widget in the example application. Hope, I will soon get some considerable progress in the coming day.

  • Reading blogs from the Builder-developers actually made me realise how powerful and feature-packed this IDE is.

    • I learnt that Builder-IDE has support for a Designer, here Glade 3. That means it is easier to see widgets created using composition. (For all these times, I was struggling so hard to tweak even simple things in the ui file without this designer. Finally I have it! I am still struggling because it is throwing errors.)

    glade-error

    • I can split files into multiple separate workspaces that means my long-standing issue of handling multiple files from different projects at the same time is solved very beautifully now. Definitely I’ve much more to learn about gnome-builder even now. But I’m starting liking it now.

That’s all for the day!

Till tomorrow. o/

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