Hello Johannes,
thanks for presenting your perspective so promptly!
On the other end of the spectrum, the Goa SDK further evolved. Along with mainlining the rigorous sandboxing of 3rd-party tools and build systems, the SDK has received various usability improvements over the year such as support for a wildcard depot user and archive-version look-up from depot indexes.
Your work on Goa never fails to put a smile on my face because you are not only open to suggestions, but often take them much further on your own. The moment I tried 'goa info nfeske/pkg/a8-sdk' from inside my goa-projects repository felt super rewarding.
Just yesternight, my oldest Son and me spent quality time together with using the Goa SDK to bring his custom chess engine over to the PinePhone, using the Goa testbed all the time. He hasn't even the Genode source tree installed on this machine. Just Goa and the Genode toolchain and he was ready to rock. Goa has come such a long and good way.
One topic that has been lingering in my mind for years is the use of Genode as a headless VM host to replace my home server. I would love to spend some time in 2026 for customizing Sculpt for this use case, particularly simplifying the deployment and management of VMs, and making the Sculpt UI and VMs accessible via VNC. Moreover, a mechanism for creating data backups and restore VM state from these backups would be essential for productive use. Maybe there is time for exploring software RAID solutions in Genode.
These would be valuable features, both on a headless system and on a desktop.
The other one is file management in Sculpt. There are quite a few 3rd-party file browser apps already waiting to be ported to Sculpt. Even more with the prospect of a VFS plugin for the GUI session. I'd like to pick one of them, port it to Genode and start exploring how file interactions, such as opening a PDF with a PDF viewer, could be orchestrated by Sculpt. I expect that the insights gained thereby are going to contribute to Norman's vision of a capability-based desktop environment.
There are also a few pending topics in the realm of the Goa SDK such as the use of sequoia as a replacement for gnupg, which has been living on an (outdated) topic branch for a while now and is waiting to be mainlined.
Good to know that my VFS-related plans will fall on fertile ground. I'm very much looking forward to pick up the ideas on the inter-application data exchange we brainstormed together. If you have concrete application scenarios in mind, that's all the better.
Cheers Norman