Recently the Meson Build System gained some momentum. It is time to stop that.
Not that Meson is a bad piece of software – on the contrary, it is quite well designed.
Still it makes building C/C++ applications worse, by (quoting xkcd) basically creating  this:

It sets out to create a cross-platform, more readable and faster alternative to autotools. But there is already CMake that solves this.

You might say that CMake is ugly, but note that the CMake 2.x you might have tried is not the same CMake 3.x that is available today. Many patterns have improved and are now both more logical and more readable.

Nowadays the difference between Meson and CMake is just a matter of syntactic preference. The Meson authors seem to agree here.

The actual criterion for selecting a build system however should be tooling support and community spread. CMake easily wins here:

After the introduction of the server mode it got native support by QtCreator, CLion, Android Studio (NDK) and even Microsofts Visual Studio. Native means that you do not have to generate any intermediate project files, but the CMakeLists.txt is used directly by the IDE.

On the community spread side we got e.g. KDE, OpenCV, zlib, libpng, freetype and as of recently Boost. These projects using CMake not only guarantees that you can easily use them, but that you can also include them in your build via add_subdirectory such that the become part of your project. This is especially useful if you are cross-compiling – for instance to a Raspberry Pi.

On the other hand, reinventing a wheel that is tailored to the needs of a specific community (Gnome), means that it will fall behind and eventually die. This is what is currently happening to the Vala language that had a similar birth to Meson.

The meson devs might object that Meson generates build files that run faster on a Raspberry Pi. However if your cross compiling is working you do not need that. And honestly, that particular improvement could have been also achieved by providing a patch to the CMake Ninja generator..

 

 

Dear Maemo community, I have the great honor of introducing the new Community Council for the upcoming Q2/2017 period.

**The members of the new council are (in alphabetical order):**

• Juiceme (Jussi Ohenoja)
• Mosen (Timo Könnecke)
• Sicelo (Sicelo Mhlongo)

The voting results can be seen on the [voting page]

I want to thank warmly all the members of the community who participated in this most important action of choosing a new council for us!

The new council shall meet on the #maemo-meeting IRC channel next tuesday 18.06 at 20:00 UTC for the formal handover with the passing council.

Jussi Ohenoja, On behalf of the outgoing Maemo Community Council

I’m at home now. I don’t do non-public unpaid work. So let’s blog the example I’m making for him.

Imagine we want an editor that has undo and redo capability. But the operations on the editor are all asynchronous. This implies that also undo and redo are asynchronous operations.

Dear friends and Maemoans. It is again the time for us to elect the new Community Council.

The schedule for the voting process is as follows:

• The nomination period starts next Monday, on the 1st of May 2017 and will continue until the 23rd of May 2017.
• The election starts on Thursday, on the 1st of June 2017 and will continue until the 7th of June 2017. In order for us to keep the community strong, we need to have new people with fresh ideas to carry on the torch. So, please consider volunteering for the position of Maemo Council.

  On behalf of the outgoing Community Council,

  eekkelund

As mentioned in my Working on Android post, I’ve been using a mechanical keyboard for a couple of years now. Now that I work on Flowhub from home, it was a good time to re-evaluate the whole work setup. As far as regular keyboards go, the MiniLa was nice, but I wanted something more compact and ergonomic.

Combining QFuture with QUndoCommand made a lot of sense for us. The undo and the redo methods of the QUndoCommand can also be asynchronous, of course. We wanted to use QFuture without involving threads, because our asynchronosity is done through a process and IPC, and not a thread. It’s the design mistake of QtConcurrent‘s run method, in my opinion. That meant using QFutureInterface instead (which is undocumented, but luckily public – so it’ll remain with us until at least Qt’s 6.y.z releases).

So how do we make a QUndoCommand that has a undo, and that has a redo method that returns a asynchronous QFuture<ResultType>?

We just did that, today. I’m very satisfied with the resulting API and design. It might have helped if QUndoStack would be a QUndoStack<T> and QUndoCommand would have been a QUndoCommand<T> with undo and redo’s return type being T. Just an idea for the Qt 6.y.z developers.

Yes, I'm looking for a job. :-)

These six years I've spent at Canonical have literally been flying. I enjoyed my work from the very first day, when I was assigned to the Unity 2D team, developing a lightweight desktop environment for Ubuntu, though I stayed in that team just for a few weeks. The next task, which I've been carrying on till today, has been implementing the Online Accounts feature in Ubuntu; this project has been especially dear to me, given that I got to reuse and improve much of the work we developed for the Nokia N9 phone. Seeing it being adopted also by Sailfish OS and KDE has been a major satisfaction, and a proof that we were on the right track. And indeed, porting the UI to Qt/QML for running in Unity 8, plus extending and simplifying the APIs and helping with the development of client applications has been a fantastic ride.
In the times where calm was reigning in the project, I reached out to other teams and offered help, mainly for improving the geolocation service and the webapps project.

Unfortunately, with the decision to terminate the development of Unity8 and to set aside the convergence goals, all of the above is no longer relevant for Canonical's future and I, along many other developers, have left the company.

So, here's my CV.

Given that reading is boring, here's a few pictures (and even a video!) of programs I've done, not as part of my daily work but in my spare time; though, to be honest, I do enjoy middleware and logic development (and even kernel, though I got little chances to work on that so far) more than UI development:
Imaginario on the Ubuntu phone Imaginario for your desktop (under development)
Mappero Geotagger If you wish to see my code, please have a look at my gitlab, github and launchpad accounts.

Among the problems we’ll face is that we want asynchronous APIs that are undoable and that we want to switch to read only, undoable editing, non-undoable editing and that QML doesn’t really work well with QFuture. At least not yet. We want an interface that is easy to talk with from QML. Yet we want to switch between complicated behaviors.

Perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.