GTK, GNOME and GNU Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 25, 2023

• Emmanuele Bassi: The Mirror

  The GObject type system has been serving the GNOME community for more than 20 years. We have based an entire application development platform on top of the features it provides, and the rules that it enforces; we have integrated multiple programming languages on top of that, and in doing so, we expanded the scope of the GNOME platform in a myriad of directions. Unlike GTK, the GObject API hasn’t seen any major change since its introduction: aside from deprecations and little new functionality, the API is exactly the same today as it was when GLib 2.0 was released in March 2002. If you transported a GNOME developer from 2003 to 2023, they would have no problem understanding a newly written GObject class; though, they would likely appreciate the levels of boilerplate reduction, and the performance improvements that have been introduced over the years.

  While having a stable API last this long is definitely a positive, it also imposes a burden on maintainers and users, because any change has to be weighted against the possibility of introducing unintended regressions in code that uses undefined, or undocumented, behaviour. There’s a lot of leeway when it comes to playing games with C, and GObject has dark corners everywhere.

• Felipe Borges: Call for Mentors and projects for Outreachy December ’23 – March ’24 cohort

  The GNOME Foundation is interested in sponsoring up to 3 Outreachy projects for the December-March cohort.

  If you are interested in mentoring AND have a project idea in mind, visit GNOME: Call for Outreachy mentors and volunteer and submit your proposal.

• gr-lora_sdr – A GNU Radio SDR implementation of a LoRa transceiver

  The physical layer of the LoRa (LoRa PHY) is a proprietary standard owned by Semtech and people have been trying to reverse-engineer the LoRa standard for years with projects such as GR-LoRa, and over the year various people have taken over the works and new projects have come with the latest one being the gr-lora_sdr GNU Radio software-defined radio (SDR) implementation of a LoRa transceiver.

• parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20230822 ('Chandrayaan') released [stable]

  GNU Parallel 20230822 ('Chandrayaan') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4