{"id":3509,"date":"2018-01-26T16:39:37","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T16:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3509"},"modified":"2018-01-26T16:47:32","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T16:47:32","slug":"monthly-news-january-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3509","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – January 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello everyone.<\/p>\n

Things are very exciting for us at the moment. This is the start of a new year, we’re working on two new bases (Ubuntu 18.04 for Linux Mint 19 and Debian 9 for LMDE 3) and rather than diving straight into the development cycle, and working on fixing bugs and developing new features, we’ve taken some time off to improve our infrastructure, our documentation and the way we work.<\/p>\n

Before we dive into that, we’d like to thank all the people who donated to us: Neil V. in particular for donating $4,000, and the 653 other people who donated to us this December. We’ve never received as much in a single month, we’ve never received as much from a single donation, and we’ve never received donations from as many people in a single month before. So we’re extremely humbled, and extremely proud of us, and of you, and happy to see your enjoyment and your response to what we do. This is really amazing.<\/p>\n

Continuous integration<\/strong><\/p>\n

This might sound a bit technical. If you don’t understand it, it’s OK… we are starting to use new tools and technologies which greatly empower us and make it easier and faster for us to accept code contributions, build packages and guarantee quality for all our releases and the projects we maintain.
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To give you an idea, when somebody contributed a complex code change to one of our projects, we had to test that change and build the project in Linux Mint and in LMDE to make sure everything was fine. We’re now using tools which do this automatically for us.<\/p>\n

We are now using continuous integration to automate testing on Github. Every single commit, every single pull request automatically triggers a build in Linux Mint 18, Linux Mint 19 and LMDE 3. If the build fails in any of these environments, we can see it straight from Github.<\/p>\n

This allows us to merge some of the pull requests much faster than before.<\/p>\n

Debian packages are now also built automatically for each new commit.<\/p>\n

Going forward we’ll probably start using continuous integration to also perform unit and functional tests.<\/p>\n

Static code analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source code is also now scanned for every commit and pull request, against various linters and analyzers.<\/p>\n

Static code analysis doesn’t detect everything, but it can detect potential issues and thus prevent some potential bugs from ever happening at all.<\/p>\n

Again, when something is wrong, it appears automatically on Github, so we can see it before merging anything.<\/p>\n

Pre-alpha ISO and build environments<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve made ourselves a pre-alpha ISO for Linux Mint 19 and build environments for Linux Mint 19 and LMDE 3. This allows us to work on GTK 3.22 and easily build packages for our next releases.<\/p>\n

We also greatly improved our build tools. Cross-compiling a github project is now a single command. We’ll talk more about this next month, hopefully when the Linux Mint Developer Guide is ready.<\/p>\n

Important system changes in Cinnamon<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cinnamon went through important changes:<\/p>\n