This report covers the second two week block of coding time, June 4 – 17.
Week 3
This week was spent iterating through various methods to sort app launchers properly when searching. I searched the control center code to find the mime types the user can set defaults for and used those to determine which apps to consider defaults for sorting purposes.
Week 4
Towards the beginning of this week I had what I felt was a reasonably good implementation and sent it to Rui for a look. After a few revisions – mostly just to follow the established coding style better – I posted a patch for review on bug 640966 a few days ago. It likely has a number more revisions until it’s in shape for mass consumption, but all the patch versions on that bug are fully functional (at least statically, the defaults don’t yet update without restarting the Shell). I’m still not convinced sorting core apps to the front is a wise move and the few developers that have looked at the patch seem to agree, but at least there is a way to test it now. Once a definitive decision is made regarding what exactly we should be sorting to the front, it will be just a bit more work until this portion of my task is complete.
Looking Forward
My next portion of work is to retrieve search results from the GTK+ recent list that aren’t provided by another search provider. This means a few things:
- Bringing back some old code. Pre-3.4 GNOME had a recent files search system that I’ll need to resurrect, at least partially.
- Getting some search providers working on my machine. Currently no external search providers are working for me, though the only app I have installed that has a search provider at the moment is a system package of gnome-documents (v0.4.2-1) and it is blank when opened. So the first order of business may be to try to get some stuff to show up in Documents. But ultimately I’ll need to start using jhbuild to build some up-to-date apps to test with.
- Enforce an ordering of search providers. In line with the current design, certain providers should always be present and in certain locations. This includes the recent files provider.
In the process of doing this I may need to also start doing some UI work, bringing the interface up current designs. Of course, this is all subject to change, so I need to have a good talk with the designers to make sure I’m heading in the right direction.
All in all, I’m mostly on schedule and enjoying my work on GNOME Shell.