Hacking

This document describes the standards for modifying and maintaining the squeekboard project.

Principles

The project was built upon some guiding principles, which should be respected primarily by the maintainers, but also by contributors to avoid needlessly rejected changes.

The overarching principle of squeekboard is to empower users.

Software is primarily meant to solve problems of its users. Often in the quest to make software better, a hard distinction is made between the developer, who becomes the creator, and the user, who takes the role of the consumer, without direct influence on the software they use. This project aims to give users the power to make the software work for them by blurring the lines between users and developers.

Notwithstanding its current state, squeekboard must be structured in a way that provides users a gradual way to gain more experience and power to adjust it. It must be easy, in order of importance:

  • to use the software,

  • to modify its resources,

  • to change its behavior,

  • to contribute upstream.

To give an idea of what it means in practice, those are some examples of what has been important for squeekboard so far:

  • being quick and usable,

  • allowing local overrides of resources and config,

  • storing resources and config as editable, standard files,

  • having complete, up to date documentation of interfaces,

  • having an easy process of sending contributions,

  • adapting to to user’s settings and constrains without overriding them,

  • avoiding compiling whenever possible,

  • making it easy to build,

  • having code that is simple and obvious,

  • having an easy process of testing and accepting contributions.

You may notice that they are ordered roughly from “user-focused” to “maintainer-focused”. While good properties are desired, sometimes they conflict, and maintainers should give additional weight to those benefiting the user compared to those benefiting regular contributors.

Sending patches

By submitting a change to this project, you agree to license it under the GPL license version 3, or any later version. You also certify that your contribution fulfills the Developer’s Certificate of Origin 1.1.

Development environment

Squeekboard is regularly built and tested on the development environment.

Recent Fedora releases are likely to be tested as well.

Dependencies

On a Debian based system run

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential
sudo apt-get -y build-dep .

For an explicit list of dependencies check the Build-Depends entry in the debian/control file.

Testing

Most common testing is done in CI. Occasionally, and for each release, do perform manual tests to make sure that

  • the application draws correctly

  • it shows when relevant

  • it changes layouts

  • it changes views

Testing with an application:

python3 tools/entry.py

Testing visibility:

$ busctl call --user sm.puri.OSK0 /sm/puri/OSK0 sm.puri.OSK0 SetVisible b true
$ busctl call --user sm.puri.OSK0 /sm/puri/OSK0 sm.puri.OSK0 SetVisible b false

Testing layouts:

Layouts can be selected using the GNOME Settings application.

# define all available layouts. First one is currently selected.
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources "[('xkb', 'us'), ('xkb', 'de')]"

Debugging mode

Squeekboard prints some information on standard output by default. To get deep debugging information, it can also print all changes in (some of) its internal state. Those logs are most useful when reporting hard to catch issues, and can be enabled using the following command:

busctl set-property --user sm.puri.SqueekDebug /sm/puri/SqueekDebug sm.puri.SqueekDebug Enabled b true

Environment Variables

Besides the environment variables supported by GTK and GLib applications squeekboard honors the SQUEEKBOARD_DEBUG environment variable which can contain a comma separated list of:

  • force-show : Show squeekboard on startup independent of any gsettings or compositor requests

  • gtk-inspector: Spawn gtk-inspector

Coding

Reference docs

Reference documentation can be generated using:

cd squeekboard_build/ 
../squeekboard_source/cargo.sh doc --no-deps --document-private-items

as well as found online.

Project structure

Rust modules should be split into 2 categories: libraries, and user interface. They differ in the way they do error handling.

Libraries should:

  • not panic due to external surprises, only due to internal inconsistencies

  • pass errors and surprises they can’t handle to the callers instead

  • not silence errors and surprises

User interface modules should:

  • try to provide safe values whenever they encounter an error

  • do the logging

  • give libraries the ability to report errors and surprises (e.g. via giving them loggers)

Style

Note that some portions, like the .gitlab-ci.yml file have accummulated enough style/whitespace conflicts that an enforced style checker is now applied.

To fix your contributions before submitting a change, use:

./tools/style-check_source --apply

Code submitted should roughly match the style of surrounding code. Things that will not be accepted are ones that often lead to errors:

Bad example:

if (foo)
  bar();

Good example:

if (foo) {
  bar();
}

  • mixing tabs and spaces in the same block of code (or config)

Strongly encouraged:

  • don’t make lines too long. If it’s longer than ~80 characters, it’s probably unreadable already, and the code needs to be clarified;

  • put operators in the beginning of a continuation line

Bad example:

foobar = verylongexpression +
    anotherverylongexpression + 
    yetanotherexpression;

Good example:

foobar = verylongexpression
    + anotherverylongexpression
    + yetanotherexpression;

  • use /// for documentation comments in front of definitions and /*! ... */ for documentation comments in the beginning of modules (see Rust doc-comments)

If in doubt, check PEP8, the kernel coding style, or the Rust style guide.

Maintenance

Squeekboard uses Rust & Cargo for some of its dependencies.

Use the cargo.sh script for maintaining the Cargo part of the build. The script takes the usual Cargo commands, after the first 2 positional arguments: source directory, and output artifact. So, cargo test becomes:

cd build_dir
sh /source_path/cargo.sh test

Cargo dependencies

All Cargo dependencies must be selected in the version available in PureOS, and added to the file debian/control. Please check with https://software.pureos.net/search_pkg?term=librust .

Dependencies must be specified in Cargo.toml with 2 numbers: “major.minor”. Since bugfix version number is meant to not affect the interface, this allows for safe updates.

Releases

Squeekboard should get a new release every time something interesting comes in. Preferably when there are no known bugs too. People will rely on theose releases, after all.

1. Update Cargo.toml.

While the file is not actually used, it’s a good idea to save the config in case some rare bug appears in dependencies.

cd squeekboard-build
.../squeekboard-source/cargo.sh update
ninja test
cp ./Cargo.lock .../squeekboard-source

Then commit the updated Cargo.lock.

2. Choose the version number

Squeekboard tries to use semantic versioning. It’s 3 numbers separated by dots: “a.b.c”. Releases which only fix bugs and nothing else are “a.b.c+1”. Releases which add user-visible features in addition to bug fixes are “a.b+1.0”. Releases which, in addition to the previous, change the user contract in incompatible ways are “a+1.0.0”. “The user contract” means plugin APIs that are deemed stable, or the way language switching works, etc. In other words, incompatible changes to developers, or big changes to users bump “a” to the next natural number.

3. Update the number in meson.build

It’s in the project(version: xxx) statement.

4. Update packaging

Packaging is in the debian/ directory, and creates builds that can be quickly tested.

cd squeekboard-source
gbp dch --multimaint-merge  --ignore-branch

Inspect debian/changelog, and make sure the first line contains the correct version number and suite. For example:

squeekboard (1.13.0pureos0~amber0) amber-phone; urgency=medium

Add the updated debian/changelog to the commit. The commit message should contain the release version and a description of changes.

5. Update the NEWS file

Summarize the changes since the last release in the NEWS file. Use the Markdown syntax, e.g.

1.13.0 "Externality"
-----------------------------

Changes:
- A system for latching and locking views
...

6. Commit changes

Generate a commit message from the news file:

tools/make_message | git commit --file=- ...

If the commit message looks wrong, fix the NEWS file, and do git commit --amend.

7. Create a signed tag for downstreams

The tag should be the version number with “v” in front of it. The tag message should be “squeekboard” and the tag name. Push it to the upstream repository:

git tag -s -u my_address@example.com v1.13.0 -m "squeekboard v1.13.0"
git push v1.13.0

8. Rejoice

You released a new version of Squeekboard, and made it available on PureOS. Congratulations.