Hackfests

Strings frozen

Web Engines, A Coruña, Spain — December 7 to 10, 2014

For its sixth edition, the WebKitGTK+ hackfest expanded its scope and was renamed to Web Engines hackfest. Over 30 developers gathered to to discuss various aspects of the open web platform and its integration with the desktop.

Support for HTML5 notifications using libnotify was merged in WebKitGTK+, and work was started on a new threaded compositor for WebKit’s multi-process architecture. The GStreamer backend was extended to support the Web Audio and Media Source Extensions specifications, as well as becoming a way to share OpenGL context between GStreamer and WebKit.

The implementation of new CSS3 specifications was examined, with fixes in both Chromium’s engine and the W3C test suite as a result. Developers also discussed the performance of modern web engines on low-powered devices, Mozilla's new Servo engine, and the state of the art of JavaScript interpreters.

Thanks to Igalia for hosting and organizing the WebKitGTK+ hackfest.

Docs, Cambridge, UK — January 24 to 29, 2015

In this edition, the documentation team discussed the future of Mallard, the GNOME documentation format, and its new Ducktype lightweight syntax.

Feedback from the GNOME Help website was triaged and integrated back into user documentation, and development was started for an integrated feedback feature in Yelp. Documentation for GNOME games, the Files application, and the guide for system administrators were also expanded and updated together with a large number of other fixes. The developer documentation demos were improved and expanded to cater to an audience of developers approaching the GNOME platform for the first time.

Thanks to UEA School of Computing Sciences for hosting the Docs hackfest.

Developer Experience, Cambridge, UK — January 25 to 29, 2015

Several GNOME hackers from around the world gathered at this hackfest to plan the 3.16 cycle of our developer platform.

New features for GLib and GObject were discussed and implemented, including support for automatically releasing out-of-scope variables, a much more compact way to declare object types, a new list model abstraction, general-purpose reference counted memory areas, and better static analysis techniques.

The integration between GTK and OpenGL was improved taking into account the feedback from early users of the API, leading to more flexibility and a better support for modern versions of the GL protocol. The behavior of GtkPopover widgets under X11 was also improved, and work started towards a new file preview functionality.

A new abstraction layer for the internals of GNOME Builder, LibIDE, was architected, together with several improvements for the user interface; developers also discussed the basic mechanisms of xdg-app sandboxing, and details of how bundles will be packaged.

GStreamer, Staines, UK — March 13 to 15, 2015

In this edition of the GStreamer hackfest, the GStreamer team agreed on a plan to support the DASH streaming standard together with a generic and extensible decryption framework. The GStreamer OpenGL output plugin gained a feature to support sharing a GL context with external clients, which will be used by WebKit, together with a feature to render content decoded through VA-API in a near zero-copy fast path. The behavior of the RTP implementation under edge network conditions was discussed resulting in plans for how to improve it.

A large number of patches were developed during the hands-on sessions of the event, including improvements to Video4Linux format renegotiation, progress towards supporting stereoscopic video, adding support for an Android camera source element, file-descriptor passing between GStreamer processes, and a new feature for clients to declare the kind of media stream they are playing.

Thanks to Google for hosting the GStreamer hackfest at their offices.

West Coast Summit, San Francisco, USA — June 29 to July 1

GTK+ and Elementary OS developers sat down together to reduce technical divergence in some of the technologies used by the projects; as a result, patches were written to extend styling support in a few GTK+ widgets and adding edge tiling support to the Mutter window manager.

Several sessions were held around xdg-app and GNOME Builder, a prototype for a document portal to be used in Evince was written, and a roadmap for building and deployment of xdg-app repositories was discussed. Different implementations of sandboxing systems were the subject of another session with Sandstorm.io.

Finally, several text rendering features were discussed, including Emoji support in Cairo and Pango, a custom font for GNOME Builder’s minimap, and improvements to font support in GTK+.

Thanks to Endless for sponsoring and hosting the West Coast Summit at their offices.

GStreamer Summer Hackfest, Montpellier, France — August 14 to 16, 2015

Performance and hardware integration were the focus of this event: a new encoder element was released making use of NVIDIA’s hardware video encoding capabilities; the algorithm for capabilities negotiation was vastly improved, leading to a faster startup time for applications using GStreamer; a new fast path was implemented for the libav-based video decoders, which was changed to use direct rendering and avoid extra copies of frames during playback; finally a plan was formulated for a new architecture of the decoding stack better suited for embedded devices or environment with constrained resources.

The developers also started experimenting on moving the project issue tracking from GNOME’s Bugzilla to a Phabricator instance.

Open Help, Cincinnati, USA — September 28 to 30, 2015

Following the Open Help conference, some members of the GNOME documentation team organized a three-day hackfest to update the user help for the 3.18 release.

In addition to updating all the help pages to match the new features, the team worked on a new version of the “Getting Started” pages, restructured the networking documentation, and developed an initial plan for a broader reorganization of the high-level topics covered by the user guide.

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Reviewer(s) notes

Reviewed by RosannaYuen on 21-May-16

Reviewed by Rosanna and Nuritzi on June 3rd

Edited by Adelia on 15-June-16

Edited by Nuritzi on June 18

Edited by Jeff on July 6th