14 DAY TRIAL // The developers behind the GNOME Builder open-source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) application designed specifically for the GNOME desktop environment are about to wrap things up for the final release of GNOME Builder 3.24.
In only one week from the moment of writing this article, GNOME Builder 3.24 will hit the stable channel as the most advanced version of the application, as part of the release of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment. That's why they are now publishing the Release Candidate (RC) development milestone, versioned 3.23.92, as the last set of improvements and new features.
GNOME Builder 3.24 RC (3.23.92) appears to be a hefty update that adds quite some changes, starting with support for exporting Flatpak apps, support for downloading dependencies manually, support for the Adwaita theme, gnome-code-assistance and various Rustup improvements when running under Flatpak, a bunch of extra documentation, as well as EggTaskCache correctness improvements.
The user-preferred-shell discovery should now work as advertised, names are used for cursors instead of old-style enums, and it looks like it's possible to extract errors from the Vala and GMCS/MCS (Mono) compilers during builds. The Ninja build system is now used to discover VALAFLAGS from older versions of the Meson build system, and the Clang compiler now fallbacks to the CXXFLAGS and CFLAGS environment variables.
Among other improvements, we can mention that the build system will now use the $MAKE environment variable if it's specified by the user, the Clone dialog was updated to be able to strip whitespaces from URIs, you can now see the build panel on the first build, it's possible to cancel clone operations from the project greeter, and GNOME Builder now ships with a basic "make" build system.
GNOME Builder 3.24 polishes the installation of Flatpak runtimes
As you can see, there are many improvements for Flatpak apps in the upcoming GNOME Builder 3.24 release, and we continue to list the Flatpak changes implemented in this Release Candidate version with terminal improvements, better Meson support inside a Flatpak runtime, and notifications if flatpak-builder is missing from your OS. flatpak-builder is now used for finishing the cleanup commands and build process before exporting.
Furthermore, it looks like the "--require-version" argument is no longer required for the flatpak build command, Flatpak downloads were moved into the downloads phase of the build pipeline, and subprocess FD should work better when using the Flatpak development service. GNOME Builder 3.24 RC also ships with various other improvements that you can view in the changelog attached below.
Various translations have also been updated, including those for Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Czech, German, Galician, Lithuanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Indonesian, Korean, Chinese (Taiwan), Friulian, and Brazilian Portuguese languages. You can download the GNOME Builder 3.24 RC (3.23.92) source tarball right now from our website if you want to get an early taste of the upcoming release.