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How You Can Help

Mending Wall is designed to make contributions as easy as possible, either with or without programming experience. Contributions from users are essential to expand coverage of desktop environments and Linux distributions.

  • Provide feedback

    Tell us whether or not Mending Wall worked for you. It is helpful to know which Linux distribution you are using, and which desktop environments you are trying to use.

    Start a discussion

  • Report an issue

    If you find a bug, or can be more specific about what is not working for you, open an issue. It is helpful to provide specific steps to reproduce it.

    Open an issue

  • Improve configuration

    Mending Wall uses simple config files, and no programming experience is necessary to tweak them. This can involve adding new applications to Tidy Menus, additional theme config to Mend Menus, or support for a whole new desktop environment.

    Learn about configuring Mend Themes

    Learn about configuring Tidy Menus

    Start a discussion to propose changes

  • Contribute code

    Mending Wall is free software licensed under the GPLv3. It is written in C as a GNOME application using Adwaita, GTK4, and Blueprint. The background program is written in C using just GLib.

    Submit a pull request

Sponsorship

If you cannot contribute time to the project, you might consider financial support instead by becoming a sponsor.

Suggested workflow

Info

This section is written for potential contributors who would like to explore the issues that Mending Wall seeks to address, in order to improve the app and Linux desktop experience.

You have several options as a work environment:

  1. Use a virtual machine, perhaps run via Boxes, virt-manager or VirtualBox, and install a Linux distribution to work with. There is value in testing different Linux distributions, so consider it a chance to try something new!
  2. Use your current system but first create a snapshot that you can restore in case of problems, perhaps using Timeshift or Snapper.
  3. Use your current system if you are determined to fix everything that breaks anyway. You do, after all, only live once.

Investigating breakages

Once you have chosen a work environment, you need to install at least two desktop environments for testing (e.g. GNOME and KDE). In most cases, one will already have been installed when you installed Linux. After installation, a typical workflow is as follows:

  1. Log into the first desktop environment and ensure that it is running correctly. Make a copy of the configuration (see below).
  2. Log into the second desktop environment and ensure that it is running correctly. Usually there are no problems at this stage. Make a copy of the configuration.
  3. Log into the first desktop environment again. Often something will now be broken, e.g. the theme, cursors, icons, fonts. Make a copy of the (broken) configuration.
  4. Fix what is broken in the first desktop environment, which can usually be achieved through its settings app. Make a copy of the (now fixed) configuration.

You should now have four complete copies of the configuration in various states, from each of the four steps. You can now compare those (see below) and see what changed to cause the breakage, and propose updates to the Mending Wall config files to fix these breakages.

Info

Preliminary information is valuable! As soon as you have something to share, start a discussion or open an issue. Other users may be able to help in understanding problems and contributing a fix.

Copying configuration

Desktop environments keep their configuration in one of two places:

  1. GSettings, stored in the dconf database, and
  2. config files, usually stored in $HOME/.config/.

To create a copy of these, the suggested approach is:

  1. Choose a working directory, e.g. $HOME/backup. Make that directory, change into it, and create a subdirectory for the copy, e.g. copy1: mkdir -p $HOME/backup cd $HOME/backup mkdir copy1
  2. Dump your entire dconf database into the subdirectory: dconf dump / > copy1/dconf.dump
  3. Back up your entire $HOME/.config directory into the subdirectory: cp -r $HOME/.config copy1/.

You now have the first copy in copy1, and can repeat with subdirectories copy2, copy3, copy4, etc, to take a snapshot of the configuration state at various times.

Comparing configuration

Once you have multiple copies of the configuration, you can make comparisons with a recursive diff from within the working directory. To show just the files that have changed, use:

diff -qr config1 config2

To show all the lines that have changed, use:

diff -r config1 config2

Changes between dconf.dump files indicate changes in GSettings paths.

Understanding the changes

The above commands should give you a good idea of which GSettings paths and config files need to be backed up and restored to preserve the theme of the first desktop environment. But the next step is to understand what these changes actually do, and whether they can be fixed without Mending Wall at all, such as by using the settings provided by the desktop environment, or an option that restores the default theme.

This information is useful for users whose theme is already broken, and could also be automated with a new feature in Mending Wall, similar to the Restore Default GNOME Theme feature.

Creating a fix

Once you understand what is going on, you can make changes to the themes.conf configuration file as described in Mend Themes to fix the issue. This will involve adding the GSettings and config files to be saved and restored. You may not want to add everything that you found, and indeed should not add things blindly, in case that actually creates more problems. It is worth understanding what each of the changed GSettings and config files does, at least to the extent that saving and restoring them can be justified.

Testing the fix

You will want to do some testing now to ensure that the fix actually works. Using a fresh virtual machine is ideal to test from scratch. From a first desktop environment that is working as desired, a typical test sequence is:

  1. Start Mending Wall and ensure that Mend Themes is running.
  2. Log out of the first desktop environment.
  3. Log into the second desktop environment.
  4. Log out of the second desktop environment.
  5. Log into the first desktop environment again.
  6. See whether your fix worked.
  7. Iterate if necessary.

Useful tools

  • For an app to browse the dconf database and make edits, consider Dconf Editor.

  • For an app to modify .desktop files, consider Libre Menu Editor.

  • To watch for changes to the dconf database, use the dconf command-line tool: dconf watch / The path / can be made more specific, e.g. dconf watch /org/gnome/desktop/ This will output changes to the path live as you mess about.