GNOME Shell Hackfest 2019

This week, I have attended the GNOME Shell Hackfest 2019 held in Leidschendam, The Netherlands. It was a fantastic event, in a fantastic city! The list of attendees was composed of key members of the community, so we managed to get a lot done — a high amount of achievements for only three days of hackfest, in fact.

Mutter

My personal interests in this hackfest floated around Mutter more than GNOME Shell. In fact, we managed to either review, merge, or discuss a few things interesting points:

• Multiple frame clocks for multiple monitors; Jonas and Carlos talked about event delivery and painting routines, and my small contribution to the discussion was about the requirements for moving actors between monitors and their corresponding frame clocks. Looks like we managed to get a pretty solid picture of what should happen next!
• Carlos opened merge requests for his ClutterSeat work, and it looks promising.
• Landed a couple of improvements to geometric picking.
• Carlos, Jonas and I are now officially maintainers of Mutter, in addition to Florian!

Some of my own work also had a share of love:

• My graphene branch was merged! I’ll continue the CoglMatrix → graphene_matrix_t transition, but that’s a huge step already. Not only graphene allows us to offload a lot from Cogl, but in the future it will probably play an important role in reducing CPU usage.
• Another cool merge request making CoglJournal more useful was also merged. Though in the future, we might as well drop the journal entirely due to paint nodes.
• During the flight back, I managed to plot the full transition to paint nodes in Clutter, and actually write about a third of the code for it. It went all the way from splitting pick and paint code paths, to introducing new types of paint nodes, to post-transition plans such as paint node caching, diffing, etc. It will be a massive change, but the possibilities it will bring are well worth it. For GNOME 3.36, I expect to land at the very least half of what’s necessary for the paint node transition to happen.

GNOME Shell

During the past few months, I found myself involved in a couple of very big changes in GNOME Shell: the new lock screen, and a bigger design review of the overview.

What started as an attempt to upstream part of Endless OS features (Drag n’ Drop of icons in custom positions) triggered a bigger change in how other elements of the Shell are places, and how they behave. More on this GNOME Shell front will be shared later; right now, it is too much of a moving target, and any exposition of what’s going on would only be misleading.

One small nicety that sparked during the hackfest was the wiggling effect of failed password attempts. It was a 30-minute hack that turned into a very nice effect, designers enjoyed and polished a few parameters, it was merged and will be part of 3.36. Nice!

Conclusion

This hackfest was very productive and I believe it had a big impact, both in short and long term plans. I’d like to appreciate Carlos Garnacho for all his work on organizing the event, and Hans de Goede for being our host. The hackfest was absolutely smooth, and we could focus on what matters because of your work!