Hi! I'm organising another community call, trying to make these a
regular thing. There's not quite enough time left to organise one in
February taking into account when people are available, so it'll be in
March.
This is a call, open to anybody who wants to attend, to ask questions
about Spectrum, talk about any related work they're doing or interested
in doing, etc.
If you'd like to come, please fill in this poll to indicate when works
for you:
https://www.systemli.org/poll/#/poll/tYCYsBFri1/participation?encryptionKey…
(Note that responses are public.)
Some deliberately brief updates so I can actually get all this written
down finally:
First, December was my last month working at Unikie. Some annoying
German bureaucratic quirks unfortunately got in the way and made things
difficult for me. My understanding is that they plan to continue
working with and contributing to Spectrum. Former Unikie colleagues,
I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you. :)
Relatedly, I'd like to organise another community call soon, as the last
one was really good. I'd have liked to do one in January too, but too
many non-work things getting in the way meant I wasn't able to make that
happen. But let's keep them going with a call in February. More on
this soon.
This also means that, for the time being, I'm once again funding my work
on Spectrum through community donations. (But as previously promised,
all the money I raised while I was working for Unikie will remain set
aside.) Please consider supporting my work on Spectrum through
https://github.com/sponsors/alyssais or https://liberapay.com/qyliss.
Hopefully I'll have more to share soon on other sources of funding.
What I've been doing recently: I spent December getting the
foundations of virtio-gpu support into upstream rust-vmm[1], and January
doing work on Nixpkgs. It would be a big win for development experience
if I could get rid of all of Spectrum's modifications in upstream
Nixpkgs, so I've been working towards that. I'm taking a bit of a
roundabout route because I need to be able to demonstrate why the
changes are useful in ways that aren't specific to Spectrum — as a
result of this, I've actually been working a bit on improving Nixpkgs'
FreeBSD support, since it shares some characteristics with Spectrum
that most Linux systems wouldn't. (Non-systemd udev implementation, for
example.)
[1]: https://github.com/rust-vmm/vm-virtio/commits/c527b45dada0a81d343aca7f06759…
Upcoming challenges I'm thinking about:
- Way too much of my time at the moment is spent doing QA — making
sure new Nixpkgs updates or kernels aren't going to introduce
regressions in Spectrum. We do some unusual things, so can't rely
on other people to catch problems before they affect us. I want to
get some automated testing against upstreams sorted out, so I can
free up more of my time for working on documentation and features,
which is what I really want to be doing but am fighting for time for
at the moment. Getting to 0 Nixpkgs patches is part of this.
- I want to improve the experience for other contributors — I know it's
lacking in various ways. I think the quickest win here will be to
figure out a way to let people join the Spectrum chat through Matrix
without being kicked after 30 days of inactivity (which is what the
Libera bridge does). I've been told there are various alternative
ways we could have this work. Having reliable real-time chat is
pretty critical for collaboration, and it's become especially clear,
especially after winter holidays, that we don't quite have that at
the moment.
Also, I'll be at FOSDEM this weekend. Get in touch on IRC (qyliss on
libera) or Matrix (@qyliss:fairydust.space) if you want to say hello.
