Felipe Borges: Call for project ideas and mentors for Google Summer of Code 2022

It is that time of the year again when we start gathering ideas and mentors for Google Summer Code .

Google Summer of Code 2022 will bring some changes. Our main highlights are:

• Expanded eligibility: The program will no longer be solely focused on university students or recent graduates.
• Multiple Sizes of Projects: medium sized projects (~175 hours) and large projects (~350 hours)
• Read Expanding Google Summer of Code in 2022 | Google Open Source Blog for more info.

Please, submit your project ideas as issues in our gitlab repository by March 1st. Make sure you answer all the questions in the issue template (Project-Proposal template).

The GNOME Foundation recognizes that mentoring is a time consuming effort, and for this reason, we will be giving accepted mentors an option to receive the $500 USD stipend that Google pays the organization for each contributor. Mentors can choose to revert the fund into a donation to the GNOME Foundation. Some payment restrictions may apply (please contact us for questions).

Proposals will be reviewed by the GNOME GSoC Admins and posted in our Project Ideas page.

If you have any doubts, please don’t hesitate to contact the GNOME GSoC Admins on this very same forum or on Matrix in the channel #soc:gnome.org

Georges Stavracas: On Building Bridges

After reading "Community Power Part 4: The GNOME Way", unlike the other articles of the series, I was left with a bittersweet taste in my mouth. Strangely, reading it triggered some intense negative feelings on me, even if I fundamentally agree with many of the points raised there. In particular, the "The Hows" and "In … Continue reading On Building Bridges →

Felipe Borges: Integrating sandboxed Vala apps with the host system through xdg-desktop-portals

Portals are a mechanism through which applications can interact with the host environment from within a sandbox. They give the ability to interact with data, files, and services without the need to add sandbox permissions.

Examples of capabilities that can be accessed through portals include opening files through a file chooser dialog, or printing. More information about portals can be found in Sandbox Permissions.

Some portals, such as the FileChooser one, provide an almost seamless experience without much extra code on the app side. For other portals, you usually need some code to talk to the portal’s DBus interface or use libportal.

Vala was designed specifically for the development of GNOME apps, and it has some nice syntax-sugar that makes the communication with DBus pretty simple to implement.

GNOME Boxes is written in Vala and, for this reason, instead of consuming libportal, I introduced a small singleton Portal class that centralizes the whole portal communication logic for the app. This turned out to be quite convenient, so I am copy-pasting it in other Vala apps I work on, and sharing this here in case it can be useful to you too.

This works because in Vala you can define a namespace matching the desired DBus interface name and with annotations, you can bind objects, properties, and methods to a DBus service. See the Vala DBus Client Samples for more examples.

With the Portal singleton, a call to the Background portal requesting permission for the app to run in the background gets as simple as:

var portals = Portals.get_default ();
yield portals.request_to_run_in_background ((response, results) => {
    if (response == 0)
        // do something...
});

Notice that this is an async call and you may pass a callback to handle its response.

Nothing written here is new, but I thought it was worth sharing this snippet to help others make their apps integrate with xdg-desktop-portals and reduce the unnecessary exposition of user data in sandboxed environments.

Felipe Borges: Let’s welcome our new interns!

It is that time of the year again when we get to meet our new interns participating in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. This year the GNOME Project is proud to sponsor two Outreachy internships for the May-August season and to mentor 12 students in GSoC 2021!

Our Outreachy projects are listed here, and you can find our GSoC projects here.

Our interns have received an email with instructions for the community bonding period, and you will start seeing their blog posts appearing in Planet GNOME very soon. Make sure you say “hello” and make them feel welcome in our project. Keep in mind that beyond the project’s tasks, we want them to become long-term contributors and, later on, Foundation members. You also will have a chance to get to know about their projects during our Intern Lightning Talks at GUADEC.

If you have any doubt about our participation in these programs, feel free to contact the GNOME GSoC admins or join the #soc channel.

Happy hacking!