January 2012 – infapi00

Well, as in the previous hackfest, I planned to make a post per day, but in the end I didn’t. Next time I will not make any plan.

Yesterday we had our last day of the hackfest. It was, in my opinion, a productive Hackfest where each one had the opportunity to work with other people working in the same field, and discuss several topics regarding the current situation. If you want to know all of the details and conclusions, you could read a minutes-like brainstorming document on the wiki. But If you were to ask me to pick just one, I would mention the discussion about enabling the accessibility support by default. The main conclusion was stop to use the atk-bridge as a module, and instead have that feature integrated. Doing that has several advantages, including having it compiled (and thus tested) when someone compiles GTK+ or any GTK+ app, and not only when you want to compile the “accessibility stuff”. The implementation details are still not clear. Convert atk-bridge to a library and add a dependency on GTK+ and others? Integrate it in ATK (making the bridge something like the DBUS backend)? Integrate it in GTK+? Forget ATK, and let GTK+ talk directly with the accessibility tools using GDBUS (an option that I feel is too drastic or non practical, but still in the mind of Benjamin)? Now is the time to debate it, in order to have something decided by 3.4, which we can start to testing properly at the beginning of the 3.6 cycle. Interesting times these days.

As in the previous hackfest, other conclusion is that there is a lot of work to do, but not a lot of people to do it. And this was reflected by the amount of people in attendance (some photos here). Anyway, although we were not a lot of people, we had a lot of different backgrounds represented at the hackfest. People from GTK+, ATK, AT-SPI2, WebkitGTK, Mozilla, assistive tools and QT. For example, in several discussions Frederik Gladhorn explained how the qt-bridge implements certain features, in some cases in an different way than how atk-bridge does the same thing, as Mike noted recently on his blog.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who came to this hackfest, as they made this hackfest possible. I also want to thank Igalia, GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation for their sponsorship.

Hackfest

Today the ATK/AT-SPI2 Hackfest 2012 started. This time there are fewer people than last year, but we have the addition of Benjamin Otte. During the morning the main topic was global events versus per-object events. Although being simplistic the idea would be just listening to the focused object, things get complex when you start to add some practical examples, like searching. On a web page, or in GNOME Shell overview, the focus is on the text entry. But when you start to search, the content of the search result changes, and you also want to expose that. This could be solved with global-events and filtering, or with direct per-object connection to “relevant” objects. If per-object is used, it is required to decide how and with which objects, to avoid missing notifications. In any case, if we decide to keep global events, the current implementation of the global event listening in ATK seems to not be the most appropriate (as it is based on g_signal add_emission_hook, that has some problems and could be considered overkill).

During the afternoon the main topic was the removal of key grabbing in GTK, or going into more detail, deprecating gtk_key_snooper_install. The controversial part was that the code using that on the accessibility support for GTK was removed. The reason is basically that key event emission shouldn’t be done there for a lot of reasons (as we already concluded during the previous hackfest), so that removal could be justified. *But* at this moment there isn’t any alternative implemented, so several things were broken. So in the end, the conclusion was reverse that change until there is an alternative. Probably this is a good task for this hackfest (anyway, any X expert over here?).

Going to dinner can be hard

Since today was the first day, we decided to keep it simple, and try to have dinner near the hotel where most of the people are staying. So after finding that our first option was closed, and wandering around for a while, we entered a place that seemed ok. Well, typical tascas in Galicia are in general not really vegetarian friendly, and although you can find really nice places (like “Taberna Gaia”), some people can still surprise yourself. Note: it doesn’t matter if macaroni are a kind of pasta. If the sauce includes meat, it is not vegetarian. Additionally, it was a bar with TV. And although it was not too loud at the beginning, it became totally noisy when the soccer match started. Yes, we forgot about the Real Madrid-Barcelona match.

Day 2 is coming

And tomorrow there will be more. We have plenty of things to discuss and bugs to solve, so for sure it will be a busy day. Finally I want to thank Igalia, GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation for sponsoring this event.

Mozilla Foundation
Igalia