I’ve been rather quiet recently working on new features for Builder. But we managed to just release Builder 3.22.3 which is full of bug fixes and a really new important feature. You can now meaningfully target flatpak when building your application. Matthew Leeds has done this outstanding work and it is really going to simplify how you contribute to GNOME applications going forward.
I’m really happy with the quality of this feature because it has shown me where our LibIDE design has done well, and where it has not. Of course, we will address that for 3.24 to help make some of the UI less confusing.
Without further ado, how to clone, build, run, and hack on Polari without so much as a toolchain installed on your host system. The only prerequisite is to get GNOME Builder 3.22.3 from the GNOME flatpak repository (or your distribution if it is up to date).
Open Builder, select Clone from the buttons in the header bar.
Set the URL for Polari to git://git.gnome.org/polari (optionally use user@git.gnome.org:/git/polari.git if you have commit access to GNOME)
Click on the blue Clone button and wait a few moments while we download the repository
You’ll be presented with the Workbench like so, click on “Build Preferences” in the perspective selector.
Now select “org.gnome.Polari.json” as the build runtime. (We expect this to be treated as a build configuration in 3.24 instead of a runtime)
Click the Build button on the header bar or in the build popover
On the first build, flatpak-builder is used to build all the necessary dependencies for Polari (such as telepathy). After it has built, click on the “Run” button in the header bar.
Hey! Look at that, a Polari window connected to freenode!
To make sure I’m not fooling you, let’s add a printf() to polari.c (the application entry point). Save, then click “Run” again.
How about that, we can see the output in the “Run Output” panel and Polari still seems to work. Yay!