GSoC 2023

Over the summer, for 12 weeks, I worked on rewriting Bustle in Rust and GTK 4 as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023 program. This post is an overview of the work done and the future plans for the project…

Progress Made I am thrilled to announce that a lot of progress happened once again over the past few weeks! Starting with the most important thing, the diagram, a lot of bugs has been squashed and the rendering performance is now improved to a usable and merge-able state…

Progress Made A lot of things happened these past few weeks. First, the MR to add address and system DBus recording has already been merged. Though, before that was merged, a few revisions have been made: it now parses from messages bytes directly, instead of a PCAP stream, to prevent overhead. Additionally, it now properly propagates errors, such as when the dbus-monitor binary is not found…

Progress Made This week, the PR to implement Display for Value, Array, Structure, Dict, and Maybe has been merged. Thus, there is a much nicer way now upstream to display zbus::Value, similar to GVariant. With this blocker cleared out, the zbus port MR has also been merged, fully porting the Bustle rewrite to zbus…

Progress Made There's unfortunately not a lot to talk about for the past two weeks as I have been really absorbed with finals at my university. However, while preparing for the finals, we got the PR to add from_bytes constructor for zbus::Message merged. This means that we can now construct zbus::Message from raw GDBusMessage bytes and vice versa, which is critical for porting Bustle from GDBus to zbus…

Progress Made Before the GSoC coding period started, I started implementing the diagram used to display DBus activity with the help of the template repository made by my mentor, Maximiliano. One of the first challenges is figuring out how to load the PCAP files, which is the format Bustle uses to store the DBus messages. Without implementing that first, it would be difficult to test how the diagram will look like…