[gentoo-soc] Week 3 Report for Musl support expansion to support GNOME desktop

[gentoo-soc] Week 3 Report for Musl support expansion to support GNOME desktop

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Hi folks

Week 3 of Google Summer of Code 2022 has come to an end, and with that,
I’m here with my third weekly report. I’ve made quite some progress in
getting GNOME desktop on musl profile.

First off I now have, in fact, anyone can have the GNOME desktop with
musl on Gentoo Linux. The installation of the full GNOME desktop on musl
was quite uneventful. I didn’t come across anything that would require
patching. However, one thing I’ve noticed is that GNOME on musl doesn’t
seem to work very well with -wayland flag turned on globally. So if you
do plan on running GNOME on musl, make sure to have +wayland. Other than
that I don’t think there’s much to add.

On the other hand one can now install MATE desktop, which comes very
close to GNOME 2, on musl too. It was a part of my proposal, and with a
couple of spare hours at hand, I decided to try to emerge the mate meta
package. I did face two issues which are patched [1][2] and one of the
patches has been submitted upstream[3]. The two packages that needed
patching for getting MATE to install were mate-power-manager and
mate-sensors-applet.

The package mate-power-manager needed two patches, the header file
execinfo.h is not available in musl and hence need to be surrounded in
include guards so that it’s only included in ulibc and glibc systems,
secondly there were some debug backtrace functions that too needed to be
run on only ulibc and glibc system hence similar to the execinfo patch,
I surrounded those instances of the function in include guards. Funnily,
the mate-sensors-applet package needed some include guards to be
removed. There were include guards around stdio.h and local.h, for some
reason the `ifdef` condition around local.h was getting evaluated as
false on musl, resulting in local.h not being included which in turn
resulted in the build failing. A similar issue was reported earlier[4]
but was unfortunately never patched.

However, I didn’t get much time to test MATE desktop so some run time
bugs can be expected.

For the next week I’ll begin testing  MATE and maybe setup GRS so that
other people and mentors can reproduce my environment easily (thanks to
blueness).

Hope this is a concise report for Week 3. I’ll update the blog as soon
as the blog site comes up again, it’s down for now. Till then, see ya.

[1]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26198
[2]: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/26197
[3]: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-sensors-applet/pull/128
[4]: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-sensors-applet/issues/123
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Regards,
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