What’s new in GVfs for GNOME 46?

It has been 3 years since my last post with release news for GVfs. This is mainly because previous releases were more or less just bug fixes. In contrast, GVfs 1.54 comes with two new backends. Let’s take a look at them. OneDrive One of the backends adds OneDrive support thanks to Jan-Michael Brummer. This …

Discovering SMB shares in GNOME

Available SMB shares can be found using the Other Locations view in the Files application in addition to other network shares and devices that also appear there. This internally uses several backends and volume monitors provided by the GVfs project, as I explained in my previous blog post. Just a note that there are plans …

What locations does GVfs provide?

You probably all know that you can easily access files on connected devices using the sidebar items in the Files application. Most of you also know that the Other Locations view provides access to internal storage and some other discovered services. But I have recently noticed that some people are completely unaware of the ability …

What’s new in GVfs for GNOME 40?

Unfortunately, my contributions to various projects have been limited over the last months given the various coronavirus-related restrictions. Also, I took over gnome-autoar maintainership recently on which I spent some time. So GVfs doesn’t bring as much news as I would like, but there are some which are worth mentioning. Google Shared Drives and Shared …

Devhelp on Fedora Silverblue

I have recently switched to Fedora Silverblue. The recommended way for development is to use Fedora Toolbox containers, so I have started using it and installed the various development packages there. I like the Devhelp application for browsing the API documentation. So I installed that application over GNOME Software. But the problem is that the …

Testing applications using Flatpak

There are many ways to test merge requests or development branches for GNOME applications. Developers usually clone the repository and build the code manually, or with the help of some tools. Newcomers are advised to use Builder, or BuildStream. However, if one doesn’t want to build the code and just test something, it might be …

What’s new in Files (and GVfs) for GNOME 3.36?

After Carlos Soriano and Ernestas Kulik left Files (Nautilus) development, António Fernandes and I are now officially new maintainers. Given the limited manpower, the focus is more on fixing bugs, but some neat new features have been added to Files and GVfs as well. I just explain shortly that GVfs provides access to various protocols …

Clean and linear history with GitLab

Many GNOME projects still use clean and linear commit history without merge commits even after porting to GitLab. That means that each commit represents one comprehensive feature or bug fix and there are not any side branches. I am not about to discuss the pros and cons of this approach here, you can find many …

How to call asynchronous function synchronously

GLib provides a lot of asynchronous functions, especially to deal with I/O. Unfortunately, some functions don’t have synchronous equivalents and the code has to be split into several callbacks. This is not handy in some cases. My this year’s GSoC student recently asked me whether it is possible to create synchronous function from asynchronous. He …