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Saturday, February 08, 2020
Xamarin forks and whatnots
Busy days in geewallet world! I just released version 0.4.2.198 which brings some interesting fixes, but I wanted to talk about the internal work that had to be done for each of them, in case you're interested.
- In Linux(GTK), cold storage mode when pairing was broken, because the absence of internet connection was not being detected properly. The bug was in a 3rd-party nuget library we were using: Xam.Plugin.Connectivity. But we couldn't migrate to Xamarin.Essentials for this feature because Xamarin.Essentials lacks support for some platforms that we already supported (not officially, but we know geewallet worked on them even if we haven't released binaries/packages for all of them yet). The solution? We forked Xamarin.Essentials to include support for these platforms (macOS and Linux), fixed the bug in our fork, and published our fork in nuget under the name `DotNetEssentials`. Whenever Xamarin.Essentials starts supporting these platforms, we will stop using our fork.
- The clipboard functionality in geewallet depended on another 3rd-party nuget library: Xamarin.Plugins.Clipboard. The GTK bits of this were actually contributed by me to their github repository as a Pull Request some time ago, so we just packaged the same code to include it in our new DotNetEssentials fork. One dependency less to care about!
- Xamarin.Forms had a strange bug that caused some buttons sometimes to not be re-enabled. This bug has been fixed by one of our developers and its fix was included in the new pre-release of Xamarin.Forms 4.5, so we have upgraded geewallet to use this new version instead of v4.3.
Last but not least, I wanted to mention something not strictly related to this new release. We got accepted in GNOME's gitlab, so now the canonical place to find our repository is here:
Technically speaking, this will allow us to drop GithubActions for our non-Linux CI lanes (we were already happy with our gitlab-ci recipes before we had to use GH! only limitation was that GitLab.com's free tier CI minutes for agents was Linux-only).
But in general we're just happy to be hosted by infrastructure from one of the most important opensource projects in the world. Special thanks go to Carlos Soriano and Andrea Veri for helping us with the migration.
PS: Apologies if the previous blogpost to this one shows up in planets again, as it might be a side-effect of updating its links to point to the new git repo!
PS: Apologies if the previous blogpost to this one shows up in planets again, as it might be a side-effect of updating its links to point to the new git repo!
Labels: CSharp, General, Gnome, Ingenieria, Miscelanea, Mono, Programacion, SoftwareLibre, Xamarin
# posted by knocte @ 8:37 am 
