Open Source Contributions for June 2019

I follow a lot of open source developer blogs, including some from project-based blog aggregators like Debian, Ubuntu, and some .NET developers. One of the things they do that I like is that they provide a monthly summary of the open source contributions. In some cases I’m pretty sure it’s part of accountability for getting some funding to work on the project. In other cases I think it’s just a little historical tracking on their part. Some people make lots of changes and others just have one small package they incremented slightly. As I (hopefully) continue to ramp up my open source software contributions I want to begin that process as well. Some of these are relatively inconsequential things. Many of them are documentation-driven. All of them however I hope will help open source projects or users of open source projects in at least some infinitesimal way. Worst case I’m just publically documenting my own experiences to make for easy reference for myself as well as potentially othersThis will be the first such summary articles.

• Avalonia
  • Updated documentation for building from scratch on macOS and Linux
  • Updated documentation for broken links
  • Testing ControlCatalogStandalone on all platforms and submitted small PR to fix macOS runtime bug
  • Performed mass update of the Controls documentation to at least have a skeleton with reference back to the API documentation and the source code file in GitHub.
  • Creating tutorials for using Avalonia under the following circumstances
    • Using Design Data for XAML editing previews
    • Working with Buttons Post #1 Post #2
    • Grid layout control (still need to write Part 2 though :) )
    • DataGrid grid control
• HaikuOS {:target="_blank"a}
  • Got a test environment to prove OpenJDK development with IntelliJ possible
  • Explored the possibility of porting the .NET Runtime etc. over to it by looking at how the build system on Linux is put together and what the necessary compiler toolchain dependencies are. This is going up on a shelf for the time being though.
• Ghostwriter
  • Helped up date build process on macOS and doing testing on macOS and doing real world testing of it on Linux and macOS
• Avalonia OxyPlot
  • Bugfix for axes/grids not rendering with default values.
• Orekit
  • Review of latest commits for release of Orekit 10.
• Diaspora
  • Reviewed changes made by core team at hackathon to the API functionality that I was working on late last year. Getting ready to attempt to revive my code to interact with it and begin real-world testing of it against my blog commenting system example.
• FileThresher
  • I have a new project that I’ve created to sink my teeth into Avalonia. It is one of several personal projects that had me looking for a truly cross-platform desktop client application framework. Over the years I’ve built up way too many directories full of photos, text files, pdfs, you name it. Simple utilities that look for duplicates help save some space but I want to be able to quickly go through and determine which files I truly want to toss, which files I want to save (and how to categorize them), or which files I still can’t make up my mind on. In agriculture the threshing process is where you take something like wheat stalks and seperate off the edible seed from the husks and the straw. This is a simliar process in my mind but for files, hence the name. It’s primary purpose is to be something useful for myself while learning how to use the Avalonia framework. I’m releasing it under a GPLv3 license and will open up the repository access for viewing once I hit an alpha stage. Right now it’s mostly lower-level experimentation with Avalonia constructs.