Posted on May 26, 2024 by Felipe Aníbal
Last updated on June 24, 2024
Gnome is one of the most widely used desktop environments for linux, mostly known for its graphical interface. This is the project me and Otávio Silva have chosen to work on for the final part of the course.
Gnome is comprised of many parts. From the graphical interface itself to the many apps that make up the basic desktop environment there are many sub-projects inside of gnome. We decided to work on Gnome-Calendar as it has a very active community and is written mostly in C, a language we are familiar with. We looked through the open issues and found one that seems to be within reach for a first contribution and is a good opportunity to understand the project and the contribution workflow. If we can tackle this issue quickly we plan to take up a more challenging on later.
Thankfully gnome project has a very good documentation and environment for contributions. Our first thought was to set up a virtual machine and build the project from within an isolated environment to prevent it from breaking our own interfaces. But to our surprise gnome has a builder of its own which allows us to clone the repository, compile and run the project inside the IDE in a already isolated environment made specifically for testing. Once we understood how the builder worked this saved us a lot of time and got us excited to try our first contribution.
The issue we plan to work on is a simple adjustment in the display of online meeting urls inside of the calendar's tooltips. The idea is to substitute the url with the name of the service. For instance, instead of having meet.google.com/aaa-aaaa-aaa in the tooltip (when the user hovers over an event), we want to simply have "Google Meet". This is specially useful for services that use long urls.