Revival of GTG, status update #2: git ready to test!7 min read

As a follow-up to my first global project situation update, I am happy to report great progress towards the successful revival of the GTG project.

You can see that in this fancy-pants teaser trailer (featuring epic music, big explosions and special effects), or this short status update video that also includes the trailer in it:

We’re getting really, really close. Here are some good recent news:

1. We are seriously running out of bugs for what will become the 0.4 release.
   • I have tried pretty hard to break the git version of GTG and Diego has kept fixing issues faster than I could find new bugs 🤔 At this point, it seems to be quite robust and safe to use, so I need you to test it like maniacs.
   • The rest of the tickets in the issue tracker are all feature requests or non-critical issues that can wait to future releases (such as performance optimizations).
2. Recently I have completed the reorganization and rewriting of the contributors documentation for the GTG project. Please take the time (7 to 9 minutes) to read that blog post.
3. Thanks to Danielle Vansia’s diligent work, the effort to update and reorganize the user manual is well underway. I believe more great work is yet to come on that front. In addition to viewing with with Yelp, you can also read it online here.
4. Thanks to Mart Raudsepp’s invaluable help, GTG now supports the highly-popular Meson build system.
   • That also means GNOME Builder can now build & run GTG directly.
   • You can still run GTG manually like before with the “launch.sh” script; simply ensure you have the “meson” package installed before doing so.
   • Unlike the previous launch script, this also facilitates translation work now as it automatically compiles the translation files and also supports running the development version with a language environment variable, such as “LANG=fr_CA.UTF8 ./launch.sh“!
5. I have spent a couple of days (including a 9-10 hours nonstop coding session) reworking the code to harmonize, improve and deduplicate translatable strings, and redo the whole French translation (now with more chocolatine) and bring it to 100% completion as a way to test and ensure everything in the UI that can possibly be translated is, indeed, translated (barring one strange bug). I can assure you, the fact that I did not eat for over 53 hours in a row was a mere coïncidence.
6. We have a Twitter account and a Mastodon account now. Go nuts.
7. We are supposed to be migrating from GitHub to GNOME’s GitLab instance eventually. We’ll need help.

In prevision for the upcoming 0.4 release, I have also made a new release of libLarch, 3.0.1. This is a picture of me making that libLarch release:

Call for contributors
(testers, hackers, translators, packagers)

Now is a great time to get involved, whether with code, translations, or pre-packaging.

• Considering that I’ve run out of bugs to report, I want you to start testing GTG’s git version now, and report bugs in GitHub².
  • See the read-me for tips on how to build and run the Git version, or see the footnotes below regarding our flatpak packages¹)
  • If nobody finds serious issues, then we can assume our code is “perfectly stable” and would be ready to make a release “any day now”… well, I still have to research and write release notes before that happens (wanna help?), however.
• If you are a GNOME translator, now is your call to review and update your translations if you want to squeeze them in before the release scheduled to happen (which, barring the absence of new showstopper bugs, should happen within weeks at most).
  • Yes, I know this isn’t much of an “advance notice” at all, but we live in special times this cycle;
  • Also yes, I know the project is on GitHub instead of GNOME’s gitlab, but I haven’t got the skills and time to fix that myself. I’ll accept translation files thrown at me by email if that makes it any easier. If you are working on the translation for a particular language, you should let others know through this ticket.
• If you are a Linux package maintainer who wants to be able to offer GTG 0.4 and libLarch 3.0.1 “from day one” or as an update in your distro, you may want to start preparations for packaging this release, considering that GTG and libLarch no longer depend on Python 2 nor GTK 2…

Adopt a a puppy plugin!

In order to be able to move fast towards 0.4 without being tied to single-handedly fixing “everything”, we’ve had to split the plugins (and data/synchronization backends) into a couple of categories: those that we can easily fix, those that are no longer relevant and those that are broken but “probably interesting to some users, while not mission-critical”. Those that were not trivial to fix have been deactivated (moved to the “unmaintained” subfolder)—at least until someone new (you?) cares enough about a particular feature to come fix and maintain it. Adopt a puppy today!

Alternate “backends” are particularly affected by this, as the only backend we’ve left enabled is the default “local storage” backend.

If you care about GTG integrating with Evolution, GNote or Tomboy (Tomboy-NG?), LaunchPad, Mantis, Bugzilla, Hamster, and Remember the Milk (that one seemed like a pretty popular backend), then please step up to contribute fixes and maintainership for your favorite plugin/backend. Otherwise, it will most likely stay deactivated.

You can see the issues related to plugins/backends here.

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Footnotes

1. All development infrastructure has been moved to GitHub; we will be decommissionning everything in LaunchPad (to the extent that it is possible to just “disable” things?) as soon as 0.4 comes out. We are supposed to be migrating from GitHub to GNOME’s GitLab instance next.
2. One thing that is expected to be particularly important to release 0.4 to a wider audience is offering Flatpak packages. We’re mostly ready for this (see this ticket) but it might take a few more days before we can figure out how to have the nightly/dev package officially published as a flatpak (on Flathub, for example) before the 0.4 release package.
   If you don’t want to wait for that, and want a temporary flatpak to try the git version “now!!”, you can go in this folder, download the flatpak file that is sitting there and run: flatpak install -y --user gtg-git-2020-06-11.flatpak (for example). To uninstall it when you want to switch to a more official flatpak later on, do: flatpak uninstall --user org.gnome.GTGDevel; and if you have ideas on how to improve that flatpak package, feel free to help out in the ticket mentioned above.

P.s.: You might think grabbing a random package file from some obscure folder listing on a website is a bit reminiscent of Windows, and therefore by now you would inevitably be asking, “So where’s the keygen!?!”, but since there isn’t any, I would instead recommend you listen to the piece of music below to have the whole “install apps obtained from a website mentioned in a random post” experience!