andre klapper’s blog.

• Neuer Laptop. Windows XP komplett zerschossen beim Installieren des Grafikkartentreibers. Allerdings auch keinerlei Motivation, das zu reparieren. GNOME/Linux auf der anderen Seite durch das Kopieren meiner alten Daten auch so zerschossen, daß ich weder Symbole noch ein Menü mehr hatte. Unterhaltsam: Nach einem strace auf Nautilus als Test-Benutzer ging dann auch wieder in meinem echten Benutzerkonto alles. Nein, ich will das alles gar nicht verstehen. Viel wichtiger ist doch, dass ich meine Ximian- und Microsoft-Sticker auf dieses viereckige Modeaccessoire rüberbekomme und eine passende schicke pinke Laptoptasche finde, oder? Wer kommt jetzt mit auf die Loveparade?

  Insgesamt aber mal wieder sehr beeindruckt gewesen, wie zeitsparend es ist, daß man jegliche Software zentral mit einem Klick installieren kann. Ich verstehe nicht den Masochismus, sich unter Windows wie im Jahre 1995 auf irgendwelchen (ggf. noch nicht mal vertrauenswürdigen) Internetseiten die ganzen gewünschten Programme einzeln herunterzuladen und auch noch selbst installieren zu müssen.

• Deutschland vs. Türkei - bla bla, Integrationsdebatte, beide Fahnen an Autos, schon genug drüber gelesen, innenpolitisch, ich weiß. Habe allerdings gestern die Wirkung auf gerade nur für einige Monate in Deutschland verweilende Menschen bemerkt, die ziemlich beeindruckt davon waren, dass hier anscheinend multinationaler Patriotismus einigermaßen unkompliziert funktionieren kann. Und das in Deutschland!
• Der verbreitete Werbeslogan “Geldkarte/Euro-Führerschein rein, Drogen raus” für Zigarettenautomaten ist eine Lüge, mit einem tschechischen Euro-Führerschein geht das schon mal nicht. Konsequenter nächster Schritt wäre, den Aufdruck auf den Zigarettenpackungen zu erweitern: “Rauchen: Bitte nur Erwachsene und Deutsche”.
• Wer Ironie findet, darf sie behalten. Oder noch besser: “In diesem Blog verbreitete Meinungen geben nicht die Meinungen meiner Arbeitgeber oder Regierung wieder.”

Less incoming bug reports.

In 2008 (the last 163 days), 31231 reports have been opened and 29997 reports have been closed in GNOME bugzilla so far.

	2008 (accumulated)	2007	2006	2005
Opened:	70126	114043	67543	37845
Closed:	67355	108807	59006	34196

This means that for the first time we get significantly less reports than the year before. How comes? GNOME less buggy, less users? Probably not.

We have many crasher reports going by default to crash.gnome.org instead of GNOME bugzilla. This is a Google Airbag installation that is already in use and receives hundreds of bug reports, and no-one cares about because it is unusable, missing debug info for nearly every distribution on this world, and pretty unmaintained. I’ve asked for documentation a few times before GNOME 2.22.0 was released, but nothing has happened. There is no possibility for distributions to submit debug info to extract useful stacktraces. Only advantage I currently see is that we are not flooded by bugs anymore in GNOME Bugzilla, but we’re losing track on those issues that really count, because we cannot see the stats and numbers of the issues filed to crash.gnome.org - it’s a big black hole and some bugs there already have hundreds (thousands?) of duplicates.

Another potential reason for less reports: A long time ago, Ubuntu has switched to report by default to Launchpad instead, but now that Bugzilla automatically rejects incoming reports from old releases (=< 2.19.99) this finally makes a difference.
And all this means…? More spare time for bugsquaders! Code! Hobbies! Love! Ice cream! Real life, here I come!

Gimmie bugs.

GNOME Bugzilla continues to get flooded by Gimmie crasher reports (especially bug 475020, we can auto-reject most of the Gimmie problems but not this one) that haven’t been fixed for months.

And now I realize (thanks to cosimoc!): “After a talk with Gimmie creator Alex Graveley, due to his shortage on time to maintain Gimmie, he allowed me to fork Gimmie thus starting MAYANNA.” and “to not ruin the Gimmie name we decided to branch it. Alex is also a Project member of MAYANNA”. Can somebody explain to me why just branching Gimmie was not an option? So one avoids ruining a software project’s name by completely abandoning any development and progress on it? (Keep in mind: Gimmie [applet] was proposed for GNOME 2.22 by its maintainer.)
A fork makes sense if several people cannot agree on aims. But I don’t understand it if the main project seems to be dead anyway.
The first thing that translation team maintainers is told is to resign when it is time. I originally had this in mind, but maybe this cannot not be applied to a maintainer that has written the entire software project on his own, like in this case. So, can we call Gimmie officially unmaintained and dead? If so, we may warn translators to not waste their time, and we may auto-reject any Gimmie bug reports in GNOME Bugzilla and close all existing bugs as WONTFIX. Currently it’s just the feeling of wasting time to see people triaging all those incoming Gimmie duplicates but nobody cares about the reports, that’s why I blogged this.

Die Kathedrale und der Basar

Ich habe vor einiger Zeit ein Interview über die sozialen Aspekte von Open-Source-Softwareentwicklung gegeben, welches jetzt veröffentlicht wurde. Wer schon immer mal etwas mehr verstehen wollte, was ich eigentlich in meiner Freizeit mache und dabei keinen technischen Krams lesen möchte, könnte dies interessant finden. Der Artikel “Die Kathedrale und der Basar” als PDF nach dem Klick.

Ein Donnerstag morgen bei McDonalds in Berlin

Aus dem Radio dudelt “Durch den Monsun” auf Englisch, ein abgewracktes und eiliges Mädel schnorrt mich nach Geld an (ich teile ihr mit, dass ich auch nur noch 1,70 in der Tasche habe), und am Nachbartisch unterhalten sich zwei Damen und ein Herr im mittleren Alter über in KZs umgebrachte Kinder. Zum Frühstück!
Zeit meinen Kaffee auszutrinken und sich zum Linuxtag aufzumachen, oder lieber in Ländern Kaffee zu trinken in denen ich nicht alles verstehen kann (Bayern?).

Spent the last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Prague. It was a pleasure to meet and see lots of friends and new people from the Ubuntu and GNOME universe. Technically speaking lots of workshops were a bit to Ubuntu specific to me (I mostly attended QA and Mobile sessions but do not run Ubuntu myself), but I hope that I could provide useful input with regard to upstream collaboration. Physically meeting makes it definitely easier to discuss problems and impressions directly instead of using IRC and mailing lists - I had a few talks about Nokia/Maemo.org bug handling, GNOME release team issues (with Vincent and Olav), general community problems and GNOME Bugzilla bug triaging.

(Crossclub, October 2007.)

At the non-technical side, especially the last two evenings were great - I shamelessly convinced a few people to go to Crossclub on Thursday and it seems that the majority really enjoyed it. The party on friday evening was awesome - both the Ubuntu band and afterwards our beloved DJ Daniel Holbach with his furious drum’n'bass set!

The downside: My laptop (which is my work machine and has always been broken, but problems have become much worse in the last weeks) seldom worked and even refused to boot most of the times so I had to use my N810 very often. This meant that I could not really work at the same speed I’m used to. Got to buy a new laptop this week to get back with full force to work on triaging and fixing stuff in Maemo Bugzilla, at least I fixed the missing In-Reply-To header for Maemo bugmail so threading in your email client should work now (thanks Olav!).
The current Maemo bugzilla database is messy, so the short-term plan for the next days is to sync bug report statuses with (duplicated/transfered) Garage tracker and internal Nokia bug reports while guenther is mostly looking at some technical issues to improve workflow. We will also start posting weekly reports and enhance them as time goes by (feedback welcome, like always - use mail or irc).

(Nein, ich habe nicht mein Studium beendet.) Seit heute arbeite ich für die Openismus GmbH. Ich freue mich über das mir entgegengebrachte Vertrauen und bin sehr gespannt auf das neue Arbeitsumfeld und die bevorstehenden Tätigkeiten.

I’m quite late with this, but I like to mention a few more students that participated in Google’s Highly Open Participation Contest. I’m pleased to post our unofficial “runner-ups” here:

Patrick Hulin (patrick.hulin)

The GNOME Project has selected Patrick Hulin as our Grand Prize Winner because of the quality and quantity of his contributions to the project. He worked on a varied set of tasks including documentation enhancements, performance contributions to GTK+, test coverage improvements in glib and cairo, porting baobab from gnome-vfs to gio, and bug fixing on several GNOME modules, especially Totem.

David Turner (Cillian64)

David took on a variety of tasks. He warmed up by working on some of our “choose the bugs yourself” tasks (fixing twelve mnemonic bugs and testing five patches from GNOME’s bugzilla) just to dive into the codebases of empathy (providing support for removing groups) and gThumb (preparing to remove the libexif library). He also vastly improved the scrolling support in Evince.
In addition to this, David updated the JHBuild moduleset schemas and the (now new and shiny) manual itself.
David already had open source development experience, as the developer of tuxcast, a command-line linux podcatcher.

Natan Yellin (aantny)

Natan wrote an article on GConf for the GNOME Journal (not yet released). He provided Drag-and-drop support for the Online Desktop file widget and a mail widget for the Online Desktop sidebar, fixed a Deskbar-Applet bug and also modified gThumb’s metadata handling and enhancing gThumb’s script definitions.
Natan is full of ideas and provided own proposals for potential tasks. He is especially interested in AWN (a dock-like bar) and currently thinks about creating a universal applets framework for GNOME.

Philipp Kerling (k.philipp)

Philipp added an LCOV code coverage suite to Pango and GTK+ to measure code coverage. He also contributed code to the GNOME online desktop module by providing an embedded workspace switcher widget and popouts for the Online Desktop file widget. He removed old icons from the gnome-desktop module that are now shipped in gnome-icon-theme and fixed four bugs in gnome-build.
Philipp has also contributed to GNOME’s German translation team.

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In general, we again like to thank all the students participating. Many of our students went above and beyond what had been asked for by the task descriptions and were also available in our IRC channels to help each other. It was a great pleasure and wonderful experience to work with all of you - looking forward to seeing you around!

six months later… thanks to everybody who was involved in another nice release!

translations

adding “just one additional string” to a module two weeks before a major release does not sound bad at first sight. but keep in mind that most of the modules have about 20 completely translated po files. it means that 20 translation teams have to edit their po file again. don’t request string freeze breaks that late in the cycle unless you have a real reason to (security issue etc). a “nice to have” is definitely not enough!

showstoppers

our showstopper list has become smaller. beside those 4 crasher bugs that have been around for some time now, only the missing ftp backend for gvfs (Company seems to work on it) and the missing migration of trash from the old location to the new one (i hope vuntz takes a look at it) are left.
gicmo is working on finishing webdav support and the “network:” backend has been fixed this week by a. walton. and of course alex and cosimoc also work like mad on squashing bugs and getting things finalized for 2.22.0. (now i hope i did not forget anybody in my list.) if anybody has the feeling that a big blocker for 2.22 has not been addressed yet, raise your voice now!
this development cycle is a tough one for our translators (many late string changes because of finishing gvfs/gio/nautilus and a lot of new strings due to new modules). just wanted to say thanks to our translators. you really do an awesome job!

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) concluded a few days back. Google had invited 10 Open Source projects, GNOME being one of them, to set up a list of tasks for high school students.
GHOP was a great success and we had much more interested and motivated students than the approx. 100 tasks that GNOME offered (so if there’s a “next time” for this, GNOME will definitely need even more maintainers/mentors filing tasks).
Thanks to the students, GNOME has seen a lot of contributed code, improvements in automated testing, translation and documentation and many bug reports and fixes (the link is not a complete list).

Today Google published the names of the Grand Prize winners. Congratulations to GNOME’s Grand Prize winner Patrick Hulin and to the many, many other students for their great work! We hope that you gathered experience, had fun working in the GNOME community and that you will continue to contribute to GNOME and Open Source. See you around!

well. KDE 4.0 is not KDE4.
GNOME 2.22 will also have some regressions because of porting from gnome-vfs to GIO. two of them are listed in the latest GNOME showstopper review: the missing “network:” backend implementation and the missing ftp support. there are more regressions. if you have some spare time and are ready to dig into the world of GIO and/or nautilus, help is most welcome! see the GioToDo wiki page, take a look at the list of gio bugs and nautilus 2.21 bugs and/or visit #nautilus on irc. thanks for your help.