I got some time to work on open source things lately, so I thought I’d write a status update like the good folks of SourceHut (used to?) do.
These is no promise that this will be regular thing. But who knows, maybe writing about might serve as motivation to do a bit of FLOSS work every month!
First off, I added a projects page to my website! Of course, the vast majority of them are dead and buried, but listing them was an interesting experience.
The majority of my work does to Getting Things GNOME!, a personal tasks organizer that I’ve been using since 2022. I think it’s a great piece of software that has been extremely helpful to me. It lets me plan my day in the morning, and then just forget about everything that isn’t going to be actionable today.
GTG had been in some sort of development hell for a while, with a megaport branch being open for 2 years. I didn’t really want to get involved before it got merged, because at that time it wasn’t really practical to get started with the code base and fix small bugs. Any knowledge I learned about the code base was likely to be made obsolete by the megaport.
It finally got merged in February, and the main task is now to fix regressions in order to release GTG 0.7.
My strategy has been to ditch the stable 0.6 entirely on my work computer, and use the master branch instead. The GTG experience has been a lot less pleasant since, but I figured it’s the best way to find what needs to be fixed. I have opened 11 tickets over the past 4 weeks. I have fixed 3 of them myself:
- Update the pane’s filter when updating the start date of a task
- Highlight title when creating a new task
- Fix AttributeError when setting start date
Another one was fixed by somebody else, and one disappeared - probably fixed by some other commit.
Another adventure has been to make the unit tests pass again, which I started in #999, was mostly done in #1036 and finalized by 95e9022. I hope we can keep a green build from now on!
This concludes my code contributions to GTG this month.
My next adventure (besides fixing more bugs) is to increase code quality by introducing automated linting/formating using pre-commit. The first step is to introduce a simple pre-commit hook with a few basic checks.
In other news, I an planning to lean more about Linux systems by building Linux From Scratch. If I ever write another status update, that will probably be part of it!