Hi again!

This month we’ve migrated wlroots to FreeDesktop’s GitLab instance! We’ve been preparing the migration for a long time, and finally all the pieces of the puzzle came together.

The main missing piece was a way to keep our continuous integration system working. We could’ve used GitLab CI, but we have some uncommon needs (FreeBSD, loading kernel modules, etc) which would make things complicated. Instead we’ve opted for another approach based on dalligi, a custom GitLab CI runner which forwards jobs to builds.sr.ht.

The migration went pretty well overall, GitLab’s importer made the process easy. As one would expect, some things still went wrong and caused some disruption. For instance, GitLab pull requests were imported as branches in the new GitLab repository, so the original authors can’t push to update them (they need to re-open a new merge request). Some comments were randomly missing. Some comments were imported with the wrong author because GitLab can’t always link the GitHub accounts. Last, CI wasn’t running for new merge requests. It turns out GitLab won’t use the project’s CI runners for merge requests, it’ll only use CI runners available to the author. We fixed that by asking a GitLab admin to add dalligi as a global runner.

In other wlroots news, the new scene-graph API has been incrementally improved with bug fixes and new features. It now supports direct scan-out, and I’ve been working on adding helpers for xdg-shell. The cage patch now removes a bit under 1k lines of code, ie. about 25% of the whole codebase.

I’ve also continued working on soju and gamja (the pieces of software behind chat.sr.ht). soju now supports WHOX (allowing clients to query account information), MONITOR and extended-monitor (allowing clients to provide up-to-date user information in direct conversations). By the way, extended-monitor is my first published IRCv3 extension! soju will soon be able to use one separate IPv6 address for each bouncer user – to avoid getting the whole bouncer banned by an IRC network when a user misbehaves.

gamja as usual got a bunch of small quality-of-life upgrades. An optional Parcel-based build system can be used to minimize and bundle the web app. gamja can now open irc:// links when used with a bouncer, making it easier to jump into a FOSS project’s IRC channel.

Next month, I’ll focus on getting the next wlroots release ready, ship a chat.sr.ht upgrade with all of the soju + gamja improvements, and working on some amdgpu bug fixes for Valve. See you!