Status-update-October-2019.md (5865B)
- ---
- date: 2019-10-15
- layout: post
- title: Status update, October 2019
- tags: ["status update"]
- ---
- Last month, I gave you an update at the conclusion of a long series of travels.
- But, I wasn't done yet - this month, I spent a week in Montreal for [XDC][xdc].
- Simon Ser put up [a great write-up][simon blog] which goes over a lot of the
- important things we discussed there. It was a wonderful conference and well
- worth the trip - but I truly am sick of travelling. Now, I can enjoy some time
- at home, working on free and open source software.
- [xdc]: https://xdc2019.x.org/
- [simon blog]: https://emersion.fr/blog/2019/xdc2019-wrap-up/
- I have a video to share today, of a workflow on git.sr.ht that I'm very excited
- about: sending patchsets as emails from the web.
- <video src="https://sr.ht/_fUk.webm" controls muted>
- Your web browser does not support the webm video codec. Please consider using
- web browsers that support free and open standards.
- </video>
- Sourcehut's development plans can be described in three broad strokes: (1) make
- a bunch of services (or: primitives for a development hub); (2) rig them all up
- with APIs and webhooks; and (3) teach them how to talk to each other. Over the
- past year, (1) and (2) are mostly complete, and (3) is now underway. Teaching
- git.sr.ht and lists.sr.ht to talk to each other is an important step, because it
- will give us a web-based code review flow which is backed by emails. This meets
- an original design goal of Sourcehut: to build user-friendly tools on top of
- existing systems.
- The other end of this work is on lists.sr.ht, but for now it's indirect: I've
- also been working on [pygit2][pygit2 pulls] fleshing out the Odb backend API, so
- that I can make a pygit2 repo which is backed by the git.sr.ht API. From there,
- it'll be easy to teach lists.sr.ht about git.sr.ht - and perhaps other git
- services as well.
- [pygit2 pulls]: https://github.com/libgit2/pygit2/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Addevault+is%3Aclosed
- There's also a fourth stage of Sourcehut: giving back to the free software
- community. To this end, I intend to spend Sourcehut's profits on sponsoring
- motivated and talented free software developers to work on self-directed
- projects. I'm very excited to announce that there's progress here as well:
- [Simon Ser](https://emersion.fr) is now joining Sourcehut and will be doing just
- that: self-directed free software projects. He's written more about this on [his
- blog](https://emersion.fr/blog/2019/working-full-time-on-open-source/) and I'll
- be writing more on [sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org) later.
- Wrapping up Sourcehut news, I'll leave you with an out-of-context screenshot of
- a mockup I made this month:
- [![Screenshot of a Sourcehut DNS service showing DNS records managed by zone
- files in a git repository](https://sr.ht/_yhw.png)](https://sr.ht/_yhw.png)
- Let's move on to Wayland news. We've started the planning for the next sway
- release, and it's shaping up to be really cool. We expect to ship patches which
- can reduce input latency to as low as 1ms, introduce the foreign toplevel
- management protocol for better mate-panel support, and introduce damage tracking
- to our screencopy protocol - which is being used to make a VNC server for
- sway and other wlroots-based compositors; and proper drawing tablet support.
- We're also making strong headway on a long-term project to overhaul rendering
- and DRM in wlroots, with the long term goal of achieving the holy grail levels
- of performance on any device.
- [The Wayland book](https://wayland-book.com) is also in good shape. A lot of
- people have purchased the drafts - over a hundred! Thank you for picking it up,
- and please send your feedback along. I completed chapter 8 this month. I also
- expect to receive the last few parts for my second POWER9 machine today, and I
- plan on using this to test Wayland, Mesa, etc - on ppc64le. The [first POWER9
- machine][power9 article] is now provisioned and humming along in the Sourcehut
- datacenter, by the way.
- [power9 article]: https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/10/RaptorCS-redemption.html
- VR work has also been chugging along again this month. I've started contributing
- to [Monado][monado], which is basically to OpenXR as Mesa is to OpenGL. I've
- seen merged an overhaul to their build system, an overhaul for their dated
- Wayland backend, and even some deeper work ensuring conformance with the OpenXR
- specification. A lot of this work has also been in getting to know everyone and
- planning the future of the project, as it's still in early stages.
- [monado]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/monado/monado/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=merged&author_username=ddevault
- To quickly summarize my other various projects:
- - **ctools** has seen many small improvements and bug fixes, and has grown the
- dirname, rmdir, env, and sleep utilities.
- - **aerc** has also seen small improvements and bug fixes, but has also learned
- about sorting and will soon grow a threaded message list
- - **chopsui** is stirring in its sleep, and I've been giving some new attention
- to its design problems in the hopes that the next iteration will be the
- correct design for a new GUI toolkit.
- - [**wshowkeys**](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wshowkeys) is a new little tool I
- built to display your keypresses on-screen during a Wayland session, useful
- for live streaming or video recording
- - **9front** has been eating some of my evenings lately, and I've been making
- small improvements to various tools and improving Plan 9 support among some
- packages in the Go ecosystem. I have more plans for this... stay tuned.
- That's all I've got for today. Thank you for your support! Oh, and one last
- note: I've been invited to the [Github sponsors
- program](https://github.com/users/ddevault/sponsorship), so if you want to
- donate through it Github will match your donation for a little while. Cheers!