This was an unusual chance to speak at a forum other than the usual conferences I attend to, so I welcomed this as a double opportunity to explain the project to people less familiar with Chromium than those attending events such as BlinkOn or the Web Engines Hackfest, as well as to spread some awareness on our work in there.

Contributing to Chromium is something we’ve been doing for quite a few years already, but I think it’s fair to say that in the past 2-3 years we have intensified our contributions to the project even more and diversified the areas that we contribute to, something I’ve tried to reflect in this talk in no more than 25 minutes (quite a challenge!). Actually, it’s precisely because of this amount of contributions that we’re currently the 2nd biggest non-Google contributor to the project in number of commits, and among the Top 5 contributors by team size (see a highlight on this from BlinkOn 14’s keynote). For a small consultancy company such as ours, it’s certainly something to feel proud of.

With all this in mind, I organized the talk into 2 main parts: First a general introduction to the Chromium project and then a summary of the main upstream work that we at Igalia have contributed recently to it. I focused on the past year and a half, since that seemed like a good balance that allowed me to highlight the most important bits without adding too much  information. And from what I can tell based on the feedback received so far, it seems the end result has been helpful and useful for some people without prior knowledge to understand things such as the differences between Chromium and Chrome, what ChromiumOS is and how our work on several different fronts (e.g. CSS, Accessibility, Ozone/X11/Wayland, MathML, Interoperability…) fits into the picture.

Obviously, the more technically inclined you are, and the more you know about the project, the more you’ll understand the different bits of information condensed into this talk, but my main point here is that you shouldn’t need any of that to be able to follow it, or at least that was my intention (but please let me know in the comments if you have any feedback). Here you have it:

You can watch the talk online (24:05 min) on our YouTube channel, as well as grab the original slide deck as a PDF in case you also want it for references, or to check the many links I included with pointers for further information and also for reference to the different sources used.

Last, I don’t want to finish this post without thanking once again to the organizers for the invitation and for runing the event, and in particular to Andrés-Leonardo Martínez-Ortiz and Javier Provecho for taking care of the specific details involved with the “Spanish Industry Case Studies” track.

Thank you all

For those of you who don’t know what Mojo is about, there is extensive information about it in Chromium’s documentation, but for the sake of this post, let’s simplify things and say that Mojo is a modern replacement to Chromium’s legacy IPC APIs which enables a better, simpler and more direct way of communication among all of Chromium’s different processes.

Another interesting aspect of this conversion is that, unfortunately, it wouldn’t be as easy as running a “search & replace” operation since in most cases deeper changes would need to be done to make sure that the migration wouldn’t break neither existing tests nor production code. This is the reason why we often had to write bigger refactorings than what one would have anticipated for some of those migrations, or why sometimes some patches took a bit longer to get landed as they would span way too much across multiple directories, making the merging process extra challenging.

Now combine all this with the fact that we were confronted with about 5000 instances of the old types in the Chromium codebase when we started, spanning across nearly every single subdirectory of the project, and you’ll probably understand why this was a massive feat that would took quite some time to tackle.

Turns out, though, that after just 6 months since we started working on this and more than 1100 patches landed upstream, our team managed to have nearly all the existing uses of the old APIs migrated to the new ones, reaching to a point where, by the end of December 2019, we had completed 99.21% of the entire migration! That is, we basically had almost everything migrated back then and the only part we were missing was the migration of //components/arc, as I already announced in this blog back in December and in the chromium-mojo mailing list.

Progress of migrations to the new Mojo syntax by December 2019

The main problem with //components/arc was that, as explained in the bug where we tracked that particular subtask, we couldn’t migrate it yet because the external libchrome repository was still relying on the old types! Thus, even though almost nothing else in Chromium was using them at that point, migrating those .mojom files under //components/arc to the new types would basically break libchrome, which wouldn’t have a recent enough version of Mojo to understand them (and no, according to the people collaborating with us on this effort at that particular moment, getting Mojo updated to a new version in libchrome was not really a possibility).

So, in order to fix this situation, we collaborated closely with the people maintaining the libchrome repository (external to Chromium’s repository and still relies in the old mojo types) to get the remaining migration, inside //components/arc, unblocked. And after a few months doing some small changes here and there to provide the libchrome folks with the tools they’d need to allow them to proceed with the migration, they could finally integrate the necessary changes that would ultimately allow us to complete the task.

Once this important piece of the puzzle was in place, all that was left was for my colleague Abhijeet to land the CL that would migrate most of //components/arc to the new types (a CL which had been put on hold for about 6 months!), and then to land a few CLs more on top to make sure we did get rid of any trace of old types that might still be in codebase (special kudos to my colleague Gyuyoung, who wrote most of those final CLs).

Progress of migrations to the new Mojo syntax by July 2020

So please join me in celebrating this important milestone for the Chromium project and enjoy the new codebase free of the old Mojo types. It’s been difficult but it definitely pays off to see it completed, something which wouldn’t have been possible without all the people who contributed along the way with comments, patches, reviews and any other type of feedback. Thank you all! 👌 🍻

Last, while the main topic of this post is to celebrate the unblocking of these last migrations we had left since December 2019, I’d like to finish acknowledging the work of all my colleagues from Igalia who worked along with me on this task since we started, one year ago. That is, Abhijeet, Antonio, Gyuyoung, Henrique, Julie and Shin.

Now if you’ll excuse me, we need to get back to working on the Onion Soup 2.0 project because we’re not done yet: at the moment we’re mostly focused on converting remote calls using Chromium’s legacy IPC to Mojo (see the status report by Dave Tapuska) and helping finish Onion Soup’ing the remaining directores under //content/renderer (see the status report by Kentaro Hara), so there’s no time to waste. But those migrations will be material for another post, of course.

To help you understand the size of these projects, they involve millions of lines of code (Chromium is ~25 million lines of code, followed closely by Firefox and WebKit) and around 200-300 new patches landing everyday. Try to imagine, for one second, how we could make changes if we didn’t have such testing infrastructure. It would basically be utter and complete chao​s and, more especially, it would mean extremely buggy Web browsers, broken implementations of the Web Platform and tens (hundreds?) of new bugs and crashes piling up every day… not a good thing at all for Web browsers, which are these days some of the most widely used applications (and not just ’the thing you use to browse the Web’).

The Chromium Trybots in action

And it’s here where I would like to bring your attention with this post because, when it comes to these last kind of tests (what we call “Web tests” or “layout tests”), each Web engine used to rely entirely on their own set of Web tests to make sure that they implemented the many different specifications correctly.

Clearly, there was some room for improvement here. It would be wonderful if we could have an engine-independent set of tests to test that a given implementation of the Web Platform works as expected, wouldn’t it? We could use that across different engines to make sure not only that they work as expected, but also that they also behave exactly in the same way, and therefore give Web developers confidence on that they can rely on the different specifications without having to implement engine-specific quirks.

Enter the Web Platform Tests project

“The web-platform-tests project is a cross-browser test suite for the Web-platform stack. Writing tests in a way that allows them to be run in all browsers gives browser projects confidence that they are shipping software which is compatible with other implementations, and that later implementations will be compatible with their implementations."

I’d recommend visiting its website if you’re interested in the topic, watching the “Introduction to the web-platform-tests” video or even glance at the git repository containing all the tests here. Here, you can also find specific information such as how to run WPTs or how to write them. Also, you can have a look as well at the wpt.fyi dashboard to get a sense of what tests exists and how some of the main browsers are doing.

Luckily, this was a challenge that did indeed took off and all the major Web engines can now proudly say that they are regularly running about 36500 of these Web engine-independent tests (providing ~1.7 million sub-tests in total), and all the engines are showing off a pass rate between 91% and 98%. See the numbers below, as extracted from today’s WPT data:

Upstreaming Chromium's tests during the Coronavirus Outbreak

These particular constraints impacted my team in that we couldn’t really keep working on the tasks we were working on up to that point, in the context of the Chromium project. Our involvement with the Blink Onion Soup 2.0 project usually requires the landing of relatively large refactors, and these kind of changes were forbidden for the time being.

Fortunately, we found an opportunity to collaborate in the meantime with the Web Platform Tests project by analyzing and trying to upstream many of the existing Chromium-specific tests that haven’t yet been unified. This is important because tests exist for widely used specifications, but if they aren’t in Web Platform Tests, their utility and benefits are limited to Chromium. If done well, this would mean that all of the tests that we managed to upstream would be immediately available for everyone else too. Firefox and WebKit-based browsers would not only be able to identify missing features and bugs, but also be provided with an extra set of tests to check that they were implementing these features correctly, and interoperably.

The WPT Dashboard

As of today, I’m happy to report that, during the ~4 weeks we worked on this my team migrated 240 Chromium-specific Web tests to the Web Platform Tests’ upstream repository, helping increase test coverage in other Web Engines and thus helping towards improving interoperability among browsers:

• CSS Flexbox: 89 tests migrated
• CSS Filters: 44 tests migrated
• CSS Masking: 13 tests migrated
• CSS Grid Layout: 94 tests migrated

…and note that this doesn’t even include the additional 96 Chromium-specific tests that we analyzed but determined were not yet eligible for migrating to WPT (normally because they relied on some internal Chromium API or non-standard behaviour), which would require further work to get them upstreamed. But that was a bit out of scope for those few weeks we could work on this, so we decided to focus on upstreaming the rest of tests instead.

Personally, I think this was a big win for the Web Platform and I’m very proud and happy to have had an opportunity to have contributed to it during these dark times we’re living, as part of my job at Igalia. Now I’m back to working on the Blink Onion Soup 2.0 project, where I think I should write about too, but that’s a topic for a different blog post.

Credit where credit is due

From the Igalia side, my whole team was the one which took on this challenge, that is: Abhijeet, Antonio, Gyuyoung, Henrique, Julie, Shin and myself. Kudos everyone!

And from the reviewing side, many people chimed in but I’d like to thank in particular the following persons, who were deeply involved with the whole effort from beginning to end regardless of their affiliation: Christian Biesinger, David Grogan, Robert Ma, Stephen Chenney, Fredrik Söderquist, Manuel Rego Casasnovas and Javier Fernandez. Many thanks to all of you!

Take care and stay safe!

I did quit a few things this year, but for the purpose of this blog post I’ll focus on what I consider the most relevant ones: work on the Servicification and the Blink Onion Soup projects, the migration to the new Mojo APIs and the BrowserInterfaceBroker, as well as a summary of the conferences I attended, both as a regular attendee and a speaker.

But enough of an introduction, let’s dive now into the gory details…

Servicification: migration to the Identity service

This was important because at some point the Identity Service will run in a separate process, and a precondition for that to happen is that all access to sign-in related functionality would have to go through the IdentityManager, so that other process can communicate with it directly via Mojo interfaces exposed by the Identity service.

I’ve already talked long enough in my previous post, so please take a look in there if you want to know more details on what that work was exactly about.

The Blink Onion Soup project

"Layers", by Robert Couse-Baker (CC BY 2.0)

And in order to implement the multi-process model, the content module is split in two main parts running in separate processes, which communicate among each other over IPC mechanisms: //content/browser, which represents the “browser process” that you embed in your application via the Content API, and //content/renderer, which represents the “renderer process” that internally runs the web engine’s logic, that is, Blink.

With this in mind, the initial version of the Blink Onion Soup project (aka “Onion Soup 1.0”) project was born about 4 years ago and the folks spearheading this proposal started working on a 3-way plan to implement their vision, which can be summarized as follows:

1. Migrate usage of Chromium's legacy IPC to the new IPC mechanism called Mojo.
2. Move as much functionality as possible from //content/renderer down into Blink itself.
3. Slim down Blink's public APIs by removing classes/enums unused outside of Blink.

In other words, if you need your browser process to communicate with Blink for some specific purpose (e.g. reacting in a visual way to a Push Notification), it would certainly be sub-optimal to have something like this:

In contrast, using Mojo would allow us to have Blink implement those remote services internally and then publicly declare the relevant Mojo interfaces so that other processes can interact with them without going through extra layers. Thus, doing that kind of migration would ultimately allow us to end up with something like this:

However, we can’t simply ignore some stuff that lives in //content/renderer implementing part of the original logic so, before we can get to the lovely simplification shown above, we would likely need to move some logic from //content/renderer right into Blink, which is what the second bullet point of the list above is about. Unfortunately, this is not always possible but, whenever it is an option, the job here would be to figure out what of that logic in //content/renderer is really needed and then figure out how to move it into Blink, likely removing some code along the way.

This particular step is what we commonly call “Onion Soup’ing //content/renderer/<feature>” (not entirely sure “Onion Soup” is a verb in English, though…) and this is for instance how things looked before (left) and after (right) Onion Souping a feature I worked on myself: Chromium’s implementation of the Push API:

Onion Soup'ing //content/renderer/push_messaging

Of course, there were also cases where we found some public APIs in Blink that were not used anywhere, as well as cases where they were only being used inside of Blink itself, perhaps because nobody noticed when that happened at some point in the past due to some other refactoring. In those cases the task was easier, as we would just remove them from the public API, if completely unused, or move them into Blink if still needed there, so that they are no longer exposed to a content module that no longer cares about that.

Now, trying to provide a high-level overview of what our team “Onion Soup’ed” this year, I think I can say with confidence that we migrated (or helped migrate) more than 10 different modules like the one I mentioned above, such as android/, appcache/, media/stream/, media/webrtc, push_messaging/ and webdatabase/, among others. You can see the full list with all the modules migrated during the lifetime of this project in the spreadsheet tracking the Onion Soup efforts.

In my particular case, I “Onion Soup’ed” the PushMessaging,  WebDatabase and SurroundingText features, which was a fairly complete exercise as it involved working on all the 3 bullet points: migrating to Mojo, moving logic from //content/renderer to Blink and removing unused classes from Blink’s public API.

And as for slimming down Blink’s public API, I can tell that we helped get to a point where more than 125 classes/enums were removed from that Blink’s public APIs, simplifying and reducing the Chromium code- base along the way, as you can check in this other spreadsheet that tracked that particular piece of work.

But we’re not done yet! While overall progress for the Onion Soup 1.0 project is around 90% right now, there are still a few more modules that require “Onion Soup’ing”, among which we’ll be tackling media/ (already WIP) and accessibility/ (starting in 2020), so there’s quite some more work to be done on that regard.

Also, there is a newer design document for the so-called Onion Soup 2.0 project that contains some tasks that we have been already working on for a while, such as “Finish Onion Soup 1.0”, “Slim down Blink public APIs”, “Switch Mojo to new syntax” and “Convert legacy IPC in //content to Mojo”, so definitely not done yet. Good news here, though: some of those tasks are already quite advanced already, and in the particular case of the migration to the new Mojo syntax it’s nearly done by now, which is precisely what I’m talking about next…

Migration to the new Mojo APIs and the BrowserInterfaceBroker

This was a massive task where we worked hard to migrate all of Chromium’s codebase to the new Mojo APIs that were introduced a few months back, with the idea of getting Blink updated first and then having everything else migrated by the end of the year.

Progress of migrations to the new Mojo syntax: June 1st - Dec 23rd, 2019

Well, as it turns out, the previous APIs had a few problems that were causing some confusion due to not providing the most intuitive type names (e.g. what is an InterfacePtrInfo anyway?), as well as being quite error-prone since the old types were not as strict as the new ones enforcing certain conditions that should not happen (e.g. trying to bind an already-bound endpoint shouldn’t be allowed). In the Mojo Bindings Conversion Cheatsheet you can find an exhaustive list of cases that needed to be considered, in case you want to know more details about these type of migrations.

Now, as a consequence of this additional complexity, the task wouldn’t be as simple as a “search & replace” operation because, while moving from old to new code, it would often be necessary to fix situations where the old code was working fine just because it was relying on some constraints not being checked. And if you top that up with the fact that there were, literally, thousands of lines in the Chromium codebase using the old types, then you’ll see why this was a massive task to take on.

Fortunately, after a few months of hard work done by our Chromium team, we can proudly say that we have nearly finished this task, which involved more than 1100 patches landed upstream after combining the patches that migrated the types inside Blink (see bug 978694) with those that tackled the rest of the Chromium repository (see bug 955171).

And by “nearly finished” I mean an overall progress of 99.21% according to the Migration to new mojo types spreadsheet where we track this effort, where Blink and //content have been fully migrated, and all the other directories, aggregated together, are at 98.64%, not bad!

On this regard, I’ve been also sending a bi-weekly status report mail to the chromium-mojo and platform-architecture-dev mailing lists for a while (see the latest report here), so make sure to subscribe there if you’re interested, even though those reports might not last much longer!

Now, back with our feet on the ground, the main roadblock at the moment preventing us from reaching 100% is //components/arc, whose migration needs to be agreed with the folks maintaining a copy of Chromium’s ARC mojo files for Android and ChromeOS. This is currently under discussion (see chromium-mojo ML and bug 1035484) and so I’m confident it will be something we’ll hopefully be able to achieve early next year.

Finally, and still related to this Mojo migrations, my colleague Shin and I took a “little detour” while working on this migration and focused for a while in the more specific task of migrating uses of Chromium’s InterfaceProvider to the new BrowserInterfaceBroker class. And while this was not a task as massive as the other migration, it was also very important because, besides fixing some problems inherent to the old InterfaceProvider API, it also blocked the migration to the new mojo types as InterfaceProvider did usually rely on the old types!

Architecture of the BrowserInterfaceBroker

Attendance to conferences

As usual, I started the year attending one of my favourite conferences of the year by going to FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels. And even though I didn’t have any talk to present in there, I did enjoy my visit like every year I go there. Being able to meet so many people and being able to attend such an impressive amount of interesting talks over the weekend while having some beers and chocolate is always great!

Next stop was Toronto, Canada, where I attended BlinkOn 10 on April 9th & 10th. I was honoured to have a chance to present a summary of the contributions that Igalia made to the Chromium Open Source project in the 12 months before the event, which was a rewarding experience but also quite an intense one, because it was a lightning talk and I had to go through all the ~10 slides in a bit under 3 minutes! Slides are here and there is also a video of the talk, in case you want to check how crazy that was.

Took a bit of a rest from conferences over the summer and then attended, also as usual, the Web Engines Hackfest that we at Igalia have been organising every single year since 2009. Didn’t have a presentation this time, but still it was a blast to attend it once again as an Igalian and celebrate the hackfest’s 10th anniversary sharing knowledge and experiences with the people who attended this year’s edition.

Finally, I attended two conferences in the Bay Area by mid November: first one was the Chrome Dev Summit 2019 in San Francisco on Nov 11-12, and the second one was BlinkOn 11 in Sunnyvale on Nov 14-15. It was my first time at the Chrome Dev Summit and I have to say I was fairly impressed by the event, how it was organised and the quality of the talks in there. It was also great for me, as a browsers developer, to see first hand what are the things web developers are more & less excited about, what’s coming next… and to get to meet people I would have never had a chance to meet in other events.

As for BlinkOn 11, I presented a 30 min talk about our work on the Onion Soup project, the Mojo migrations and improving Chromium’s code health in general, along with my colleague Antonio Gomes. It was basically a “extended” version of this post where we went not only through the tasks I was personally involved with, but also talked about other tasks that other members of our team worked on during this year, which include way many other things! Feel free to check out the slides here, as well as the video of the talk.

Wrapping Up

Also, and getting back to work-related stuff here again, this year I also became accepted back at Igalia’s Assembly after having re-joined this amazing company back in September 2018 after a 6-year “gap” living and working in the UK which, besides being something I was very excited and happy about, also brought some more responsibilities onto my plate, as it’s natural.

Last, I can’t finish this post without being explicitly grateful for all the people I got to interact with during this year, both at work and outside, which made my life easier and nicer at so many different levels. To all of you,  cheers!

And to everyone else reading this… happy holidays and happy new year in advance!

But what is this "Chromium servicification project"? Well, according to the Wiktionary the word "servicification" means, applied to computing, "the migration from monolithic legacy applications to service-based components and solutions", which is exactly what this project is about: as described in the Chromium servicification project's website, the whole purpose behind this idea is "to migrate the code base to a more modular, service-oriented architecture", in order to "produce reusable and decoupled components while also reducing duplication".

Doing so would not only make Chromium a more manageable project from a source code-related point of view and create better and more stable interfaces to embed chromium from different projects, but should also enable teams to experiment with new features by combining these services in different ways, as well as to ship different products based in Chromium without having to bundle the whole world just to provide a particular set of features. 

For instance, as Camille Lamy put it in the talk delivered (slides here) during the latest Web Engines Hackfest,  "it might be interesting long term that the user only downloads the bits of the app they need so, for instance, if you have a very low-end phone, support for VR is probably not very useful for you". This is of course not the current status of things yet (right now everything is bundled into a big executable), but it's still a good way to visualise where this idea of moving to a services-oriented architecture should take us in the long run.

With this in mind, the idea behind this project would be to work on the migration of the different parts of Chromium depending on those components that are being converted into services, which would be part of a "foundation" base layer providing the core services that any application, framework or runtime build on top of chromium would need.

As you can imagine, the whole idea of refactoring such an enormous code base like Chromium's is daunting and a lot of work, especially considering that currently ongoing efforts can't simply be stopped just to perform this migration, and that is where our focus is currently aimed at: we integrate with different teams from the Chromium project working on the migration of those components into services, and we make sure that the clients of their old APIs move away from them and use the new services' APIs instead, while keeping everything running normally in the meantime.

At the beginning, we started working on the migration to the Network Service (which allows to run Chromium's network stack even without a browser) and managed to get it shipped in Chromium Beta by early October already, which was a pretty big deal as far as I understand. In my particular case, that stage was a very short ride since such migration was nearly done by the time I joined Igalia, but still something worth mentioning due to the impact it had in the project, for extra context.

After that, our team started working on the migration of the Identity service, where the main idea is to encapsulate the functionality of accessing the user's identities right through this service, so that one day this logic can be run outside of the browser process. One interesting bit about this migration is that this particular functionality (largely implemented inside the sign-in component) has historically been located quite high up in the stack, and yet it's now being pushed all the way down into that "foundation" base layer, as a core service. That's probably one of the factors contributing to making this migration quite complicated, but everyone involved is being very dedicated and has been very helpful so far, so I'm confident we'll get there in a reasonable time frame.

If you're curious enough, though, you can check this status report for the Identity service, where you can see the evolution of this particular migration, along with the impact our team had since we started working on this part, back on early October. There are more reports and more information in the mailing list for the Identity service, so feel free to check it out and/or subscribe there if you like.

One clarification is needed, tough: for now, the scope of this migrations is focused on using the public C++ APIs that such services expose (see //services/<service_name>/public/cpp), but in the long run the idea is that those services will also provide Mojo interfaces. That will enable using their functionality regardless of whether you're running those services as part of the browser's process, or inside their own & separate processes, which will then allow the flexibility that chromium will need to run smoothly and safely in different kind of environments, from the least constrained ones to others with a less favourable set of resources at their disposal.

And this is it for now, I think. I was really looking forward to writing a status update about what I've been up to in the past months and here it is, even though it's not the shortest of all reports.

One last thing, though: as usual, I'm going to FOSDEM this year as well, along with a bunch of colleagues & friends from Igalia, so please feel free to drop me/us a line if you want to chat and/or hangout, either to talk about work-related matters or anything else really.

And, of course, I'd be also more than happy to talk about any of the open job positions at Igalia, should you consider applying. There are quite a few of them available at the moment for all kind of things (most of them available for remote work): from more technical roles such as graphics, compilers, multimedia, JavaScript engines, browsers (WebKit, Chromium, Web Platform) or systems administration (this one not available for remotes, though), to other less "hands-on" types of roles like developer advocate, sales engineer or project manager, so it's possible there's something interesting for you if you're considering to join such an special company like this one.

See you in FOSDEM!

And besides meeting new people and some old friends (which I admit to be one of my favourite aspects about attending these kind of events), and discovering what it’s now my new favourite place for fast-food near London bridge, I happened to learn quite a few new things while working on my particular personal quest: getting Chromium browser to run as an xdg-app.

While this might not seem to be an immediate need for Endless right now (we currently ship a Chromium-based browser as part of our OSTree based system), this was definitely something worth exploring as we are now implementing the next version of our App Center (which will be based on GNOME Software and xdg-app). Chromium updates very frequently with fixes and new features, and so being able to update it separately and more quickly than the OS is very valuable.

Screenshot of Endless OS's current App Center

Fortunately, the base documentation about xdg-app together with Alex Larsson’s blog post series about this topic (which I wholeheartedly recommend reading) and some experimentation from my side was enough to get started with the whole thing, and I was quickly on my way to fixing build issues, adding missing deps and the like.

Note that my goal at this time was not to get a fully featured Chromium browser running, but to get something running based on the version that we use use in Endless (Chromium 48.0.2564.82), with a couple of things disabled for now (e.g. chromium’s own sandbox, udev integration…) and putting, of course, some holes in the xdg-app configuration so that Chromium can access the system’s parts that are needed for it to function (e.g. network, X11, shared memory, pulseaudio…).

Of course, the long term goal is to close as many of those holes as possible using Portals instead, as well as not giving up on Chromium’s own sandbox right away (some work will be needed here, since setuid binaries are a no-go in xdg-app’s world), but for the time being I’m pretty satisfied (and kind of surprised, even) that I managed to get the whole beast built and running after 4 days of work since I started :-).

But, as Alberto usually says… “screencast or it didn’t happen!”, so I recorded a video yesterday to properly share my excitement with the world. Here you have it:

[VIDEO: Chromium Browser running as an xdg-app]

Last, I would like to finish this blog post saying thanks specially to Richard Hughes for organizing this event, as well as the GNOME Foundation and Red Hat for their support in the development of GNOME Software and xdg-app. Finally, I’d also like to thank my employer Endless for supporting me to attend this hackfest. It’s been a terrific week indeed… thank you all!

Credit to Georges Stavracas

But as much as like Emacs as my main “weapon”, I sometimes appreciate the advantages of using a different kind of beast for specific purposes. And, believe me or not, in the past 2 years I learned to love Eclipse/CDT as the best work-mate I know when I need some extra help to get deep inside of the two monster C++ projects that WebKit and Chromium are. And yes, I know Eclipse is resource hungry, slow, bloated… and whatnot; but I’m lucky enough to have fast SSDs and lots of RAM in my laptop & desktop machines, so that’s not really a big concern anymore for me (even though I reckon that indexing chromium in the laptop takes “quite some time”), so let’s move on :-)

However, there’s this one little thing that still bothers quite me a lot of Eclipse: you need to manually setup the include paths for the external dependencies not in a standard location that a C/C++ project uses, so that you can get certain features properly working such as code auto-completion, automatic error-checking features, call hierarchies… and so forth.

And yes, I know there is an Eclipse plugin adding support for pkg-config which should do the job quite well. But for some reason I can’t get it to work with Eclipse Mars, even though others apparently can use it there for some reason (and I remember using it with Eclipse Juno, so it’s definitely not a myth).

Anyway, I did not feel like fighting with that (broken?) plugin, and in the other hand I was actually quite inclined to play a bit with Python so… my quick and dirty solution to get over this problem was to write a small script that takes a list of package names (as you would pass them to pkg-config) and generates the XML content that you can use to import in Eclipse. And surprisingly, that worked quite well for me, so I’m sharing it here in case someone else finds it useful.

Using frogr as an example, I generate the XML file for Eclipse doing this:

  $ pkg-config-to-eclipse glib-2.0 libsoup-2.4 libexif libxml-2.0 \
        json-glib-1.0 gtk+-3.0 gstreamer-1.0 > frogr-eclipse.xml

…and then I simply import frogr-eclipse.xml from the project’s properties, inside the C/C++ General > Paths and Symbols section.

After doing that I get rid of all the brokenness caused by so many missing symbols and header files, I get code auto-completion nicely working back again and all those perks you would expect from this little big IDE. And all that without having to go through the pain of defining all of them one by one from the settings dialog, thank goodness!

Now you can quickly see how it works in the video below:

VIDEO: Setting up a C/C++ project in Eclipse with pkg-config-to-eclipse