Status update 18/07/2022

Summer is here!

All my creative energy has gone into wrapping up a difficult project at Codethink, and the rest of the time I’ve been enjoying sunshine and festivals. I was able to dedicate some time to learning the basics of async Rust but I don’t have much to share from the last month. Instead, let me focus on some projects I’m keeping an eye on.

Firstly, in the Tracker search engine, Carlos Garnacho has landed some important features and refactors. The main one being stream-based serializers and deserializers.

This allows more easily backing up and importing data in and out the tracker-store, and cleaning up some cruft like multiple different implementations of Turtle. It seems ideal having a totally stream-based codec so you can process an effectively infinite amount of data, but there is a tradeoff if you serialize data triple-by-triple – the serialized output is much less human-readable and in some cases larger than if you do some buffering and group related statements together. For this reason we didn’t yet land the JSON-LD support.

Carlos also rewrote the last piece of Vala in libtracker-sparql into C. Vala makes some compromises that aren’t helpful for making a long-term ABI stable C library. There are more lines of code now and we particularly miss Vala’s async support, but this makes maintenance easier as we can now be sure that any misbehaving C code was generated by ourselves and not by the Vla compiler.

There are some other fixes for issues reported by various contributors, thanks to everyone that got involved in the 3.3.0 cycle so far 🙂

Meanwhile, in world of BuildStream there is a lot of activity for the final push towards a BuildStream 2.0 release. I’m only a bystander in the process and to me things look promising. The 2.0 API is finalized and frozen, there’s a small list of blockers remaining – any help to resolve these is welcome! – and then the door is open to a 2.0 release. That’s most likely to be preceded by one or more “1.97” release candidates to allow wider testing. Whatever happens the hope is that the upcoming Freedesktop SDK 22.08 release can be rolled with BuildStream “2.0”.

I’ve been using Bst 1.x for a while and finding it a very helpful tool. The REAPI support is particularly cool as it allows organisations to manage a single distributed build infrastructure that multiple tools can make use of – I hope it gains more traction, and I think it’s already helping to “sell” BuildStream to organisations that are looking at doing distributed builds.

Finally, Kate Bush’s music is super popular again, which is great and I want to share this tidbit from my own youth in the early 2000s right out of Sunderland doing an excellent Hounds of Love cover: