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Status-update-October-2019.md (5865B)


  1. ---
  2. date: 2019-10-15
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Status update, October 2019
  5. tags: ["status update"]
  6. ---
  7. Last month, I gave you an update at the conclusion of a long series of travels.
  8. But, I wasn't done yet - this month, I spent a week in Montreal for [XDC][xdc].
  9. Simon Ser put up [a great write-up][simon blog] which goes over a lot of the
  10. important things we discussed there. It was a wonderful conference and well
  11. worth the trip - but I truly am sick of travelling. Now, I can enjoy some time
  12. at home, working on free and open source software.
  13. [xdc]: https://xdc2019.x.org/
  14. [simon blog]: https://emersion.fr/blog/2019/xdc2019-wrap-up/
  15. I have a video to share today, of a workflow on git.sr.ht that I'm very excited
  16. about: sending patchsets as emails from the web.
  17. <video src="https://sr.ht/_fUk.webm" controls muted>
  18. Your web browser does not support the webm video codec. Please consider using
  19. web browsers that support free and open standards.
  20. </video>
  21. Sourcehut's development plans can be described in three broad strokes: (1) make
  22. a bunch of services (or: primitives for a development hub); (2) rig them all up
  23. with APIs and webhooks; and (3) teach them how to talk to each other. Over the
  24. past year, (1) and (2) are mostly complete, and (3) is now underway. Teaching
  25. git.sr.ht and lists.sr.ht to talk to each other is an important step, because it
  26. will give us a web-based code review flow which is backed by emails. This meets
  27. an original design goal of Sourcehut: to build user-friendly tools on top of
  28. existing systems.
  29. The other end of this work is on lists.sr.ht, but for now it's indirect: I've
  30. also been working on [pygit2][pygit2 pulls] fleshing out the Odb backend API, so
  31. that I can make a pygit2 repo which is backed by the git.sr.ht API. From there,
  32. it'll be easy to teach lists.sr.ht about git.sr.ht - and perhaps other git
  33. services as well.
  34. [pygit2 pulls]: https://github.com/libgit2/pygit2/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Addevault+is%3Aclosed
  35. There's also a fourth stage of Sourcehut: giving back to the free software
  36. community. To this end, I intend to spend Sourcehut's profits on sponsoring
  37. motivated and talented free software developers to work on self-directed
  38. projects. I'm very excited to announce that there's progress here as well:
  39. [Simon Ser](https://emersion.fr) is now joining Sourcehut and will be doing just
  40. that: self-directed free software projects. He's written more about this on [his
  41. blog](https://emersion.fr/blog/2019/working-full-time-on-open-source/) and I'll
  42. be writing more on [sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org) later.
  43. Wrapping up Sourcehut news, I'll leave you with an out-of-context screenshot of
  44. a mockup I made this month:
  45. [![Screenshot of a Sourcehut DNS service showing DNS records managed by zone
  46. files in a git repository](https://sr.ht/_yhw.png)](https://sr.ht/_yhw.png)
  47. Let's move on to Wayland news. We've started the planning for the next sway
  48. release, and it's shaping up to be really cool. We expect to ship patches which
  49. can reduce input latency to as low as 1ms, introduce the foreign toplevel
  50. management protocol for better mate-panel support, and introduce damage tracking
  51. to our screencopy protocol - which is being used to make a VNC server for
  52. sway and other wlroots-based compositors; and proper drawing tablet support.
  53. We're also making strong headway on a long-term project to overhaul rendering
  54. and DRM in wlroots, with the long term goal of achieving the holy grail levels
  55. of performance on any device.
  56. [The Wayland book](https://wayland-book.com) is also in good shape. A lot of
  57. people have purchased the drafts - over a hundred! Thank you for picking it up,
  58. and please send your feedback along. I completed chapter 8 this month. I also
  59. expect to receive the last few parts for my second POWER9 machine today, and I
  60. plan on using this to test Wayland, Mesa, etc - on ppc64le. The [first POWER9
  61. machine][power9 article] is now provisioned and humming along in the Sourcehut
  62. datacenter, by the way.
  63. [power9 article]: https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/10/RaptorCS-redemption.html
  64. VR work has also been chugging along again this month. I've started contributing
  65. to [Monado][monado], which is basically to OpenXR as Mesa is to OpenGL. I've
  66. seen merged an overhaul to their build system, an overhaul for their dated
  67. Wayland backend, and even some deeper work ensuring conformance with the OpenXR
  68. specification. A lot of this work has also been in getting to know everyone and
  69. planning the future of the project, as it's still in early stages.
  70. [monado]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/monado/monado/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=merged&author_username=ddevault
  71. To quickly summarize my other various projects:
  72. - **ctools** has seen many small improvements and bug fixes, and has grown the
  73. dirname, rmdir, env, and sleep utilities.
  74. - **aerc** has also seen small improvements and bug fixes, but has also learned
  75. about sorting and will soon grow a threaded message list
  76. - **chopsui** is stirring in its sleep, and I've been giving some new attention
  77. to its design problems in the hopes that the next iteration will be the
  78. correct design for a new GUI toolkit.
  79. - [**wshowkeys**](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wshowkeys) is a new little tool I
  80. built to display your keypresses on-screen during a Wayland session, useful
  81. for live streaming or video recording
  82. - **9front** has been eating some of my evenings lately, and I've been making
  83. small improvements to various tools and improving Plan 9 support among some
  84. packages in the Go ecosystem. I have more plans for this... stay tuned.
  85. That's all I've got for today. Thank you for your support! Oh, and one last
  86. note: I've been invited to the [Github sponsors
  87. program](https://github.com/users/ddevault/sponsorship), so if you want to
  88. donate through it Github will match your donation for a little while. Cheers!