Status update, october 2019

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Status update, October 2019
+tags: ["status update"]
+---
+
+Last month, I gave you an update at the conclusion of a long series of travels.
+But, I wasn't done yet - this month, I spent a week in Montreal for [XDC][xdc].
+Simon Ser put up [a great write-up][simon blog] which goes over a lot of the
+important things we discussed there. It was a wonderful conference and well
+worth the trip - but I truly am sick of travelling. Now, I can enjoy some time
+at home, working on free and open source software.
+
+[xdc]: https://xdc2019.x.org/
+[simon blog]: https://emersion.fr/blog/2019/xdc2019-wrap-up/
+
+I have a video to share today, of a workflow on git.sr.ht that I'm very excited
+about: sending patchsets as emails from the web.
+
+<video src="https://sr.ht/_fUk.webm" controls muted>
+  Your web browser does not support the webm video codec. Please consider using
+  web browsers that support free and open standards.
+</video>
+
+Sourcehut's development plans can be described in three broad strokes: (1) make
+a bunch of services (or: primitives for a development hub); (2) rig them all up
+with APIs and webhooks; and (3) teach them how to talk to each other. Over the
+past year, (1) and (2) are mostly complete, and (3) is now underway. Teaching
+git.sr.ht and lists.sr.ht to talk to each other is an important step, because it
+will give us a web-based code review flow which is backed by emails. This meets
+an original design goal of Sourcehut: to build user-friendly tools on top of
+existing systems.
+
+The other end of this work is on lists.sr.ht, but for now it's indirect: I've
+also been working on [pygit2][pygit2 pulls] fleshing out the Odb backend API, so
+that I can make a pygit2 repo which is backed by the git.sr.ht API. From there,
+it'll be easy to teach lists.sr.ht about git.sr.ht - and perhaps other git
+services as well.
+
+[pygit2 pulls]: https://github.com/libgit2/pygit2/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Addevault+is%3Aclosed
+
+There's also a fourth stage of Sourcehut: giving back to the free software
+community. To this end, I intend to spend Sourcehut's profits on sponsoring
+motivated and talented free software developers to work on self-directed
+projects. I'm very excited to announce that there's progress here as well:
+[Simon Ser](https://emersion.fr) is now joining Sourcehut and will be doing just
+that: self-directed free software projects. He's written more about this on [his
+blog](https://emersion.fr/blog/2019/working-full-time-on-open-source/) and I'll
+be writing more on [sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org) later.
+
+Wrapping up Sourcehut news, I'll leave you with an out-of-context screenshot of
+a mockup I made this month:
+
+[![Screenshot of a Sourcehut DNS service showing DNS records managed by zone
+files in a git repository](https://sr.ht/_yhw.png)](https://sr.ht/_yhw.png)
+
+Let's move on to Wayland news. We've started the planning for the next sway
+release, and it's shaping up to be really cool. We expect to ship patches which
+can reduce input latency to as low as 1ms, introduce the foreign toplevel
+management protocol for better mate-panel support, and introduce damage tracking
+to our screencopy protocol - which is being used to make a VNC server for
+sway and other wlroots-based compositors; and proper drawing tablet support.
+We're also making strong headway on a long-term project to overhaul rendering
+and DRM in wlroots, with the long term goal of achieving the holy grail levels
+of performance on any device.
+
+[The Wayland book](https://wayland-book.com) is also in good shape. A lot of
+people have purchased the drafts - over a hundred! Thank you for picking it up,
+and please send your feedback along. I completed chapter 8 this month. I also
+expect to receive the last few parts for my second POWER9 machine today, and I
+plan on using this to test Wayland, Mesa, etc - on ppc64le. The [first POWER9
+machine][power9 article] is now provisioned and humming along in the Sourcehut
+datacenter, by the way.
+
+[power9 article]: https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/10/RaptorCS-redemption.html
+
+VR work has also been chugging along again this month. I've started contributing
+to [Monado][monado], which is basically to OpenXR as Mesa is to OpenGL. I've
+seen merged an overhaul to their build system, an overhaul for their dated
+Wayland backend, and even some deeper work ensuring conformance with the OpenXR
+specification. A lot of this work has also been in getting to know everyone and
+planning the future of the project, as it's still in early stages.
+
+[monado]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/monado/monado/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=merged&author_username=SirCmpwn
+
+To quickly summarize my other various projects:
+
+- **ctools** has seen many small improvements and bug fixes, and has grown the
+  dirname, rmdir, env, and sleep utilities.
+- **aerc** has also seen small improvements and bug fixes, but has also learned
+  about sorting and will soon grow a threaded message list
+- **chopsui** is stirring in its sleep, and I've been giving some new attention
+  to its design problems in the hopes that the next iteration will be the
+  correct design for a new GUI toolkit.
+- [**wshowkeys**](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wshowkeys) is a new little tool I
+  built to display your keypresses on-screen during a Wayland session, useful
+  for live streaming or video recording
+- **9front** has been eating some of my evenings lately, and I've been making
+  small improvements to various tools and improving Plan 9 support among some
+  packages in the Go ecosystem. I have more plans for this... stay tuned.
+
+That's all I've got for today. Thank you for your support! Oh, and one last
+note: I've been invited to the [Github sponsors
+program](https://github.com/users/ddevault/sponsorship), so if you want to
+donate through it Github will match your donation for a little while. Cheers!