Building Wheels
For the first time this year I got to spend a little paid time on open source work, in this case putting some icing on the delicious and nourishing cake that we call BuildStream 2.
If you’ve tried the 1.9x pre-releases you’ll have seen it depends on a set of C++ tools under the name BuildBox. Some hot codepaths that were part of the Python core are now outsourced to helper tools, specifically data storage (buildbox-casd, buildbox-fuse) and container creation (buildbox-run-bubblewrap). These tools implement remote-apis standards and are useful to other build tools, the only catch is that they are not yet widely available in distros, and neither are the BuildStream 2 prereleases.
Separately, BuildStream 2 has some other hot codepaths written with Cython. If you’ve ever tried to install a Python package from PyPI and wondered why a package manager is running GCC, the answer is usually that it’s installing a source package and has to build some Cython code with your system’s C compiler.
The way to avoid requiring GCC in this case is to ship prebuilt binary packages known as wheels. So that’s what we implemented for BuildStream 2 – and as a bonus, we can bundle prebuilt BuildBox binaries into these packages. The wheels have a platform compatibility tag of “manylinux_2_28.x86_64” so they should work on any x86_64 host with GLIBC 2.28 or later.
Connecting Gnomes
I didn’t participate in GUADEC this year for various reasons, I’m very glad to see it was a success. I was surprised to see six writeups of the Berlin satellite event, and only two of the main event in Mexico (plus one talk transcript and some excellent coverage in LWN) – are Europeans better at blogging? 🙂
I again saw folk mention that connections *between* the local, online and satellite events are lacking – I felt this at LAS this year – and I still think we should take inspiration from 2007 Twitter and put up a few TVs in the venue with chat and microblog windows open.
The story is, that Twitter launched in 2006 to nobody, and it became a hit only after putting up screens at a US music festival in 2007 displaying their site where folk could live-blog their activities.
I’d love to see something similar at conferences next year where online participants can “write on the walls” of the venue (avoiding the ethically dubious website that Twitter has become).
On that note, I just released a new version of my Twitter Without Infinite Scroll extension for Firefox.
Riding Trains
I made it from Galicia to the UK overland, actually for the first time. (I did do the reverse journey already by boat + van in 2018). It was about 27 hours of travel spread across 5 days, including a slow train from Barcelona into the Pyrenees, and a night train onwards to Paris, and I guess cost around 350€. The trip went fine, in comparison to the plane I had booked to return which was cancelled by the airline without notification, so the return flight+bus ended up costing a similar amount and taking nearly 15 hours. No further comment on that but I can recommend the train ride!
Sam Thursfield 
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