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)
It’s announced.
And I’m proud to be part of it.
See it in action.
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.
Current Dropdown:
New Dropdown:
New Context Menu:
Currently:
New, with context menus:
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.
If I got everything right I could create the following categories for the GNOME modules that still depend on Bonobo/Orbit:
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.
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 fresh and cool tarball is now available.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Willie just updated the wiki page.
NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 15->9).
NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 12->10).
COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 32->19).
NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 9->6).
COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 17->12).
See above.
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.
The ever-active Javier Jardón initiated an IRC Bugsquad meeting on
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
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!
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:
Some of the feedback I got after the talk and at the Nokia party in the evening:
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.
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.
This list is of course not complete. Also see LibgnomeMustDie.
Feel encouraged to add your issues.
NOT COMPLETED (”Reopened”) now that we also check external deps and the Mobile set:
DONE.
COMPLETED.
NOT COMPLETED.
NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 22->15).
Please share experiences and knowledge.
NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 15->12).
Please share experiences and knowledge.
NOT COMPLETED (Reopened):
NOT COMPLETED. Evolution schedule currently under discussion.
A Git branch is available.
IN PROGRESS. WebKitGTK+ has been proposed as an external dependency.
See d-d-l for the status.
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.
NOT COMPLETED.
According to “jhbuild rdepends hal –direct” the following modules still depend on HAL:
Not yet covered in the stats but required to fix are also:
Nice to fix:
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.
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.
