Updates from the release team

Community
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On help

The release team just had their meeting for the 49 development cycle (two of them, actually), and discussed the current state of help and documentation in GNOME.
The executive summary is:

Help needs your help!

We are facing a number of overlapping issues here, and we would like to ask for help from the community. In no particular order:

  • Yelp is not actively maintained. Shaun is still around, but he does not have much time for yelp, and yelp is lagging behind in a number of transitions:

    • GTK4 port (yelp is the last thing dragging GTK3 webkit into our runtimes)
    • meson build system
    • CI (needed for doing releases, if nothing else)

  • We’ve recently had a CVE in yelp, and it was a bit of a struggle to get it fixed. This is unfortunately going to keep happening, since yelp relies on web technologies that can and will produce CVEs

  • The existing documentation is written in Mallard, which is a niche format that relies on its own tooling, and is also not actively maintained (the project Mallard website has disappeared, and some of the tooling does not build anymore with supported python releases)

  • The documentation team is basically dormant, so our help is not receiving the updates that it deserves

What is needed?

Shaun has thankfully agreed to try and help us get the most important MRs (meson, gtk4, ci) merged, but it would be very helpful to have more people contributing to yelp and helping to maintain it.

It would also be good to do a pass over the existing documentation and fix up the most outdated bits.

Longer-term, we need to think about replacing the documentation format and tooling. If you have experience in this area, your contribution could make a real difference.

This is a great reminder that it is not required to be a coder to make important contributions to GNOME. Everybody can help! If you don’t know where to start, come and ask us.

Thanks :heart:

9 Likes
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Hi, I’m not a developer (I learn python and C at school but I didn’t use it for a few years) but I will like to start help open source project. I’m ready to learn new things if necessary (I love learning new stuff). Also I’m a native french speaker so I could do some translation work if needed.

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Doesn’t Ubuntu/Canonical use Yelp helper too? Is there anyone on their team that might be able to lend any help as well if someone reached out to them perhaps?

4

Hi,
do you also mean that you’ll drop the WebKitGTK 4.1 API from the
Flatpak runtime once the yelp does not need it? The GNOME Evolution
(though not part of the GNOME core for some time now) uses it, and
surely will for quite some time, and it is available in the flathub.org
(262k installs as of today is not that many, that’s true) where it does
use the GNOME runtime. It’ll mean to build the WebKitGTK for each
update of it, if you’ll drop the WebkitGTK 4.1 API, right? How long
does it take to build it, do you know, please? A pointer to a build
recipe for the WebKitGTK 4.1 API in the Flatpak will help.

Thanks and bye,
Milan
5


On a 16 core Intel CPU i9-12900K (24) @ 5.20 GHz:

[8266/8273] Linking CXX executable bin/MiniBrowser
[8267/8273] Generating WebKit2-4.1.gir
[8268/8273] Generating WebKit2WebExtension-4.1.gir
[8269/8273] Generating WebKit2-4.1.typelib
[8270/8273] Generating WebKit2WebExtension-4.1.typelib
[8271/8273] Generating documentation: WebKit2
[8272/8273] Generating documentation: WebKit2WebExtension

==> Finished making: webkit2gtk-4.1 2.48.2-1 (Fri May 23 22:31:43 2025)

real	37m38.897s
user	0m0.085s
sys     0m0.191s


I’ve been building the past couple releases against GTK3 (built with -Dx11-backend=false) in order to run Evolution in an x11-less GTK environment, but this is the full standard build of WebkitGTK 4.1, version 2.48.2.

tl;dr…it’s a big build.

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This is a great reminder that it is not required to be a coder to make important contributions to GNOME. Everybody can help! If you don’t know where to start, come and ask us

@matthiasc I’m willing to help wherever needed! How can I help reboot the documentation team?