Archive for the ‘gnome’ Category

GNOME 2.28 released!

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Just came back from the wonderful Vypsaná fixa album release party to see that there is yet another great GNOME major release available. Go check out the improvements and changes! Made to share!

Work on GNOME 3 is ongoing, of course.

(Picture by padro82, CC licensed)

The N900 & Maemo 5

Thursday, August 27th, 2009



It’s announced.
And I’m proud to be part of it.
See it in action.

Wishlist: Evolution Instant Messaging integration

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Apart from the missing code required to sync evolution-data-server’s contacts with Empathy (Nat once wrote an Evolution plugin for Pidgin but nowadays Empathy and the Telepathy stack are official part of the GNOME platform) I’ve spent an evening a few weeks ago thinking about how I’d expect integration of Instant Messaging in the Contacts User Interface of Evolution while having a beer in my favorite club. Calling the currently available options poor is an euphemism – they simply do not exist. Evolution developers have neither plans nor time to work on such stuff for Evolution 2.30 so I was in the mood to come up with some mockups of what I’d expect.

Sometimes I wish GNOME had a bounty program (either separate or integrated in Bugzilla) so I could say “If you code this as an Evolution Plugin and it gets accepted by maintainers you get xxx EUR”. That idea is obviously still missing mentors that help the coder with implementation issues though.

Evolution Mail Composer

Current Dropdown:

Current Evolution Mail Composer

New Dropdown:

New Evolution Mail Composer

New Context Menu:

New Evolution Mail Composer Context Menu

Evolution Contacts

Currently:

Current Evolution Contacts

New, with context menus:

New Evolution Contacts with Context Menus

GNOME 3 update + Module proposals welcome now!

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Propose your module for GNOME now

Module proposal period for the next GNOME release has started!

If you are a maintainer of a module that you want to propose for official inclusion in GNOME: Do it now! See the wiki for the guidelines. Also note that you will receive slightly less negative feedback if you avoid using deprecated modules (libbonobo/ui, libgnome/ui, libgnomecanvas, libart_lpgl, gnome-vfs, libgnomeprint/ui, esound, orbit, libglade) and deprecated Glib and GTK+ symbols. ;-)

And now another (last?) GNOME 3 status update before 2.28 will hit the streets…
See also the cleanup stats and the 2.27/2.29 schedule.

Killing Bonobo

If I got everything right I could create the following categories for the GNOME modules that still depend on Bonobo/Orbit:

  • A11Y

    This seems to cover orca, dasher, gok, mousetweaks, accerciser and gnome-session. At-spi, gnome-mag and gnome-speech might die and get replaced by at-spi2, gnome-shell and speech-dispatcher. libgail-gnome has already died by getting integrated into gtk+ (Orca was the last consumer and got fixed two weeks ago).
    See here for a general overview.
  • gnome-panel

    gnome-panel blocks the Bonobo dependencies of bug-buddy, gnome-applets, seahorse-plugins, pessulus, sabayon, gdm, and empathy. It is likely that gnome-panel will get replaced by gnome-shell for GNOME 3 (but there is no final decision yet).
  • Evolution, Evolution-Data-Server, Evolution-Exchange

    Evolution and friends just branched for GNOME 2.28.x so the kill-bonobo and dbus-hybrid branches now can get merged into (unstable) master. After that it will be a bit easier to see how much work is left.
  • gconf

    Probably very ugly to fix. dconf might be quite ready (but developers a bit too silent in communicating that). Crossing fingers for a status report. It could also make sense to switch to the gconf-dbus branch in the meantime.
  • Legacy
    • gnome-python-desktop (as a binding)
    • glade3 (as a tool to create applications)
  • Other modules that are not officially part of GNOME

    Wondering about atomix, balsa, ghex, gnumeric, gossip and gthumb.
    Bug reports are mostly filed (yes, we also do care about warning the maintainers of modules that use deprecated functionality and are not officially part of GNOME despite of sometimes unfriendly “I don’t care about your GNOME3 stuff, why did you file this at all?” answers).
    Planner has a patch awaiting review/commit.

Killing deprecated GTK+/Glib symbols

  • gnome-games currently looks worst. It depends on the release of a new ggz tarball now that ggz patches have landed.
  • metacity seems to be in need of more love – patches welcome which might be partially shared with mutter.
  • gedit is a bit reluctant to get in the patches too early because it would change UI behaviour. Understandable.

Killing libglade

The aim for August 24 is to have less than 10 modules still depending on libglade. Currently we still have 16 modules left (only very few of them blocked by the gnome-druid migration that has to happen first). If you want to help you should provide a patch. Here’s a how-to.

Killing libgnome and libgnomeui

Apart from the bindings there are not many applications left (yelp, gnome-control-center and gok got ported in the last days), but we all know that the last steps are always the hardest ones, right?

A gnome-shell release

A fresh and cool tarball is now available.

Killing libgnomecanvas

Evolution heavily depends on libgnomecanvas. It is highly unlikely that this code will be rewritten for GNOME 3 so libgnomecanvas can either be kept deprecated but shipped in GNOME 3, or Evolution copies the code to its internal codebase. Note though that libgnomecanvas itself heavily depends on libart_lgpl which is also deprecated.

GSeal

A rather unknown variable in the current equation as GTK+ does not have everything in place yet, hence it is currently still a moving target. See the wiki for more information and how to compile your module with the GSEAL macro. Maintainers are highly encouraged to try.
In general curious about the GTK+ status with regard to version 3. Hope to see an update about this next week.

Personal opinions on interesting modules

Modules that interest me and that could be interesting for GNOME 3 or later in alphabetic order and without any claim for completeness are:
dconf, gnome-do, gnome-global-menu, gnome-packagekit, gnome-scan, gnome-shell, tracker, vala, zeitgeist.
Just wanted to write this down somewhere as I tend to empty my brain on a weekly basis.

GNOME Bugsquad policy changes

Monday, August 10th, 2009

One week ago the GNOME Bugsquad had an IRC meeting initiated by Javier Jardón. The log can be found here.

To summarize the important decisions:

  • Bug reports in GNOME Bugzilla (not: enhancement requests) with 1 year without any activity will be set to NEEDINFO state and reporters will be asked to update the report’s status by testing again on a recent GNOME version. After 6 weeks without response these reports can be closed as RESOLVED INCOMPLETE. A new stock answer will be made available for this.
  • There are many modules in GNOME Bugzilla that have not seen any code changes for years (except for translation updates). Bugsquad members will try to identify those obsolete/unmaintained modules and contact the maintainers. We expect a response within four weeks from the maintainers. Without a response the remaining reports will probably be closed as WONTFIX while explaining to the reporter that the module is not maintained anymore and will not receive any updates. I must admit that I have done this already before and complaints were fairly low (2 people when I mass-closed open gnome-vfs enhancement requests) or non-existing (e.g. when closing all open Scaffold bugs).
  • The “FIXED” stock answers will kindly ask bug reporters to verify the fix once it has landed in their distribution and if they have some time. The specific stock answers will be updated accordingly.

It was nice to discuss best practices and policies to have a less messy GNOME Bugzilla. Looking forward to our next meeting.

And PS: Hi to the Planet Fedora desktop readers.

GNOME 3 cleanup status update

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

This is another (shortened) update about cleaning up the GNOME stack for GNOME 3. This has also been posted to the desktop-devel mailing list.

This status report refers to the aims listed in the 2.27/2.29 schedule and the automatic statistics available.

PROBLEMS

STATUS OF TASKS

Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0

Willie just updated the wiki page.

Less than 9 modules depending on libgnome

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 15->9).

  • low: 7 ((gnome-python-desktop), yelp, gconf, (glade3), gconf-dbus, (gnome-python), (gnome-sharp))
  • average: 2 (Evolution, gok)
  • complex: 0
  • PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: yelp

Less than 9 modules depending on libgnomeui

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 12->10).

  • low: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution-exchange, (gnome-python-desktop), libgail-gnome which is required by Orca, yelp, (glade3), (gnome-python))
  • average: 2 (gnome-panel, gok)
  • complex: 1 (Evolution)

Less than 20 modules depending on libglade

COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 32->19).

  • low: 12
  • average: 5 (gnome-control-center, dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok)
  • complex: 1 (Evolution)
  • PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: gnome-media, gnome-panel, sound-juicer

Less than 5 modules with non-low Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 9->6).

  • low: 6
  • average: 5 (Evolution, gedit, metacity, gconf-dbus, (pygtk))
  • complex: 1 (gnome-games)
  • PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: metacity

Less than 15 modules total with Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 17->12).
See above.

HOW TO HELP

For example you should help kill libgnome(ui) by providing a patch. It’s quite often only a few lines.
If you’ve already patched a module to get rid of stuff like gnome-ui-init, gnome-icon-entry, gnome-app, gnome-program, gnome-client, gnome-macros or gnome-druid see the wiki for a list of other apps still using these.

GNOME Bugsquad meeting

Monday, July 27th, 2009

The ever-active Javier Jardón initiated an IRC Bugsquad meeting on

Monday 3rd of August, 18:00 UTC in #bugs on GIMPnet


Click here for the agenda plus feel free to add any ideas that might be worth discussion with regard to bug handling in GNOME Bugzilla.

GNOME 3 Cleanup: How you can help

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

For those that did not attend the GNOME 3.0 Live Circus^WStatus Update at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: As written in the slides (probably not that helpful if you did not attend the talk) I’ve set up a wikipage which

  • provides links to all the resources you need in order to help
  • lists todo items for getting rid of libgnome(ui) sorted by functionality (header includes) instead of modules.

The latter should be useful for contributors that are willing to help by fixing one specific libgnome(ui) functionality – learn once, fix several modules. Partial patches for the listed bug reports are welcome!

And for more ways to help see Fred’s automatic stats. As always.
Happy hacking!

Google Summer of Code problems, GCDS

Monday, July 6th, 2009

GSoC and GNOME

Today David J.Daniel G. Siegel and me gave a talk at GCDS named “Google Summer of Code & Highly Open Participation Contest: How successful is GNOME?”.
The slides are available here (PDF, 5.2MB).

The discussion after our talk basically boiled down to two issues:

  • How to keep more of the students in our community after GSoC
  • How to integrate more of the code that was written for GSoC

Some of the feedback I got after the talk and at the Nokia party in the evening:

  • Tobi said that more feedback on the weekly GSoC reports written by the students could be helpful to strengthen the feeling that there is interest in their work.
  • In case that the GSoC mentor is not also the module maintainer Cosimo proposed that an OK by the affected module maintainer should be required first to make sure that the GSoC code will be welcome (sometimes maintainers have other ideas and concepts about architecture or the path their project should take).
  • GSoC code is not integrated into the next GNOME version because of the GNOME release schedule. Hence it takes at least 9 months until the results are included in a stable release.
    There’s no solution to this as both Google and GNOME do not intend to change their schedules.
  • Diego said that there should also be an email to the corresponding project mailinglist/maintainer and/or a blog post by the mentor of the student that introduces the student.
  • Björn said that integrating people into our community might be improved by also using social networks like Facebook.

General GCDS comments

  • It’s hot and sweaty and I got a slight sunburn. Expected though. I’m good in getting them.
  • Makes me very happy to meet with so many friends, colleagues and people again for talking about code, projects, real life. Grateful to be part of this great open source community (which means GNOME, KDE and freedesktop.org here).
  • The venue has a terrace right to the sea – the smell is beautiful and yesterday we went swimming in the Atlantic ocean around midnight. Priceless.
  • Maemo Harmattan switching from GTK+ to Qt by default. After talking to several people I am not yet sure what to think about it.
  • Richard Stallman’s keynote. I must admit that I am biased as I don’t share his point of view on C# and parts of his ideology. So to me this was somewhere between a leader talking to his sect and a children’s birthday (I missed playing “Hit the Pot” after singing the Free Software song together). Potentially misogynistic “jokes” (Lefty described it quite well) made it even worse. In doubt I hope that it was not his intention. I was a bit reminded of Michael Jackson – awesome artist and great work in the past but let’s forget about the last years please.
  • GNOME 3 status talk tomorrow trying to cover most of the recent activities and plans. Let’s get the big picture to see where we are.

Microblogging

Henri tricked me at the GCDS Welcoming Party into promising him that I am going to start using Qaiku as I am the only person left using the maemo.org wiki for his activity reports. I still don’t feel comfortable with microblogging. I have a Twitter account (just needed it for reproducing some bugs on the N810) but I do not use it at all (and never intended) as the signal vs. noise ratio seems way too high (also see Stormy’s post about that and other issues with microblogging). I admit that it can be useful though. Time will tell.

GNOME 3 status.

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

This is an update about cleaning up the GNOME stack for GNOME 3. This has also been posted to the desktop-devel mailing list.

This status report refers to the aims listed in the 2.27/2.29 schedule and the automatic statistics available (which now also covers the Mobile section, hence results can be worse than last time).

Maintainers: I have listed available PATCHES AWAITING REVIEW.
Please take a look if your module is listed and review/commit NOW so the changes can receive enough testing for 2.28.

THE PROBLEMS: What migration paths are missing?

This list is of course not complete. Also see LibgnomeMustDie.
Feel encouraged to add your issues.

ZERO modules with Glib-Deprecated-Symbols

NOT COMPLETED (”Reopened”) now that we also check external deps and the Mobile set:

  • Still to do: gconf-dbus, evolution-data-server-dbus.
  • External deps to do: dbus-glib, hal, libnotify, mono. PATCHES available: dbus-glib, libnotify. FIXED: farsight2, libnice, poppler.

Officially ANNOUNCE libglade as deprecated in favor of GtkBuilder

DONE.

Less than 35 modules depending on libglade.

COMPLETED.

  • low: 25
  • average: 5 (dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok, zenity)
  • complex: 2 (gnome-control-center, evolution)
  • PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gdm, gnome-nettool, gnome-mag, gnome-media, gnome-menus, gnome-panel, gnome-session, gnome-system-tools, gtkhtml, sound-juicer, zenity, tracker. Maintainers please review/commit.

Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0

NOT COMPLETED.

Less than 12 modules depending on libgnome

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 22->15).

  • low: 10
  • average: 4 (Evolution, gnome-media, yelp, anjuta)
  • complex: 1 (gok)

Please share experiences and knowledge.

Less than 12 modules depending on libgnomeui

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 15->12).

  • low: 9
  • average: 2 (Evolution-Exchange, gnome-panel)
  • complex: 1 (Evolution)

Please share experiences and knowledge.

ZERO modules dependening on gnome-vfs

NOT COMPLETED (Reopened):

  • average: 1 (gst-plugins-base)

Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

  • low: 8
  • average: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution, gedit, metacity, glade3, gconf-dbus)
  • complex: 2 (gnome-games, gnome-media)
  • PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gedit, metacity, yelp, glade3, policykit-gnome

Evolution-Data-Server must be migrated to D-Bus by default

NOT COMPLETED. Evolution schedule currently under discussion.
A Git branch is available.

WebKit status report for 2.27.5

IN PROGRESS. WebKitGTK+ has been proposed as an external dependency.
See d-d-l for the status.

Evolution to get rid of Bonobo by 2.27.3

NOT COMPLETED and postponed for 2.29.1.
See KillBonobo for the status. Testing and reporting bugs is HIGHLY welcome. See Matthew’s blog for more information.

Complete migration from HAL to DeviceKit-* by 2.27.3

NOT COMPLETED.
According to “jhbuild rdepends hal –direct” the following modules still depend on HAL:

More important stuff to take a look at:

Not yet covered in the stats but required to fix are also:

Nice to fix:

GNOME Showstoppers

For GNOME 2.26/2.28, I have posted a Showstopper Review earlier this week. Feel free to take a look, test & help out, get things done.

Other activity

Kudos to the progress that has been made so far!
Getting rid of Popt is basically DONE.
ZERO modules dependening on Esound is DONE.
ZERO modules dependening on Gnomeprint is DONE.
The Website revamp front is rocking, and the Documentation team also has some great momentum currently.