Hello Fabio

I am not very active, and not a software engineer, but Vala/GTK applications are kind of my hobby, and I had the opportunity to take a look at elementary applications (code wise too).
You are maintaining much more packages I can ever pretend to maintain, so this will be a little help.
But I am ready to lend a hand, if I can get some guidance, milestones, and if we can work together... ?

I am CET time zone based. Do you work from the USA ?

My FAS is: avigne.
Keep me posted.
BR, Alain


On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 9:30 PM Fabio Valentini <decathorpe@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi everybody,

With more responsibilities (FPC, Stewardship SIG, FESCo) and the
ever-growing number of packages I maintain, I don't have as much time
for the things I originally started my contributions to fedora with -
the Pantheon desktop and the accompanying elementary applications.

What makes things worse is that I am not particularly proficient with
Vala or C/GObject, other than including upstream patches or doing
simple backports. That means some issues are punted until upstream
projects get around to fixing them (and if these issues are only
affecting "third-party" distros like fedora, that can take a while).

Also, the fact that GNOME frequently (almost with every new major
stable release, which means with almost every fedora release) breaks
something - either subtly or not - does not help.
gnome-settings-daemon changes its DBus interfaces almost every
release. mutter makes sweeping API changes almost every release. Both
gala and the elementary LightDM greeter can't keep up with upstream
mutter, and are basically still stuck on mutter 3.28 support (which is
why there is a mutter328 compat package) ...

Overall, this results in the quality of all these packages not being
as high as I would like it to be (though it's still pretty good, all
things considered). In particular, there are some components that are
more "crashy" than the rest, and I don't have the time and skill to
get deep into debugging the issue in most cases:

- wingpanel (the panel for Pantheon); issues in individual indicators
also crash the whole app because they are just dlopen()ed
- switchboard (the settings application); issues in individual
settings panels also crash the whole app because they are just
dlopen()ed
- gala (the window manager): obviously bad if the WM crashes, though
not as bad because it's still an Xorg session
- plank (the dock); also optionally used on XFCE (I think)
- sequeler (third-party SQL client developed for Pantheon)

I would greatly appreciate if somebody who knows their GObject-fu
could help me out here.

The elementaryOS upstream developers are usually helpful and accept
patches - even for things that are not a problem on elementaryOS, so
long as they can be switched on/off with e.g. conditional compilation.
But reported issues - that only affect fedora - without attached
patches / PRs are obviously low priority for them, and often sit
untouched for months or years.

In general, I manage to keep the packages for Pantheon / elementary
projects up-to-date. Having set up "nightly" builds on COPR a few
years ago really helps to catch potential issues early.

If anybody is interested, here are some pointers:

- all packages are tracked in koschei, in the decathorpe/elementary group:
https://koschei.fedoraproject.org/groups/decathorpe/elementary

- nightly builds are done on COPR:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/decathorpe/elementary-nightly/

Thanks,
Fabio
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--
Alain V.