Now the GNOME desktop can be emerged on musl profile. 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.
Other than that one can now install the 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 set up 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