• The Perl bindings written by Emmanuel Rodriguez have been merged into libchamplain.
• A branch by Alexander Sack reworking NetworkManager menu has been uploaded (it is named “menu-rework”).
• Mark Kasik added support for the ‘auth-info’ attribute to the CUPS print backend of GTK + (GNOME bug 566522).
• Deprecated GTK+ symbols have been removed from gok (GNOME bug 572686).
• Ryan Lortie published a gsettings branch of Devhelp, demonstrating the conversion from GConf to GSettings.
• GNOME Shell has been updated to not treat 1024×600 as widescreen (GNOME bug 596375).
• The GNOME Volume Control has been changed to allow going up to 150% for output volume (GNOME bug 591285).
• Brasero has been fixed to not leak the CD drive device file descriptor, that kept the drive locked . (GNOME bug 596241)
• Evolution has been changed to use Message-ID instead of Message-Id, for increased compatibility with other applications (GNOME bug 596157).
• Ross Burton switched evolution-data-server calendar to D-Bus instead of Bonobo, in the “dbus-calendar” branch.

• libgnomekbd and gnome-power-manager have been converted from libglade to GTKBuilder.
• Vino got ported from libdbus to dbus-glib, as a first step towards integration with the Telepathy framework . (GNOME bug 580464)
• In GTK+ the GtkLabel gained the possibility to show hyperlinks, that feature was previously provided SexyUrlLabel . (GNOME bug 508810)
• Also in GTK+ a printing backend using PAPI, as found on OpenSolaris, has been added (to both master and 2.16 ) (GNOME bug 382676)
• Support for annotations landed in Evince, it requires libpoppler 0.11 (GNOME bug 315002)
• Empathy added a fullscreen mode for video playback . (GNOME bug 580771)
• Behdad Esfahbod merged his harfbuzz-ng branch into Pango.
• The Volume Control has been updated to show high-level channel mapping string for each devices, this gives pretty names such as “Surround 7.1″ or “Stereo” ; (GNOME bug 581921).
• After a discussion on desktop-devel-list Robert Carr created a new gnome-js-common module, to share code and tests between Seed and GJS.
• In Seed a new module to bind Cairo has been developed.
• Alexander Larsson imported gnio (socket and networking support) into glib.
• Much work happened (and is still ongoing) in Orca to refactor the speech and braille generators . (GNOME bug 570658)

• Again the translation teams do great in the commits top 10, taking five places; the teams are Basque, Swedish, Romanian, Danish and Finnish (Iñaki Larrañaga Murgoitio, Daniel Nylander, Jani Monoses and Ilkka Tuohela).
• gtk-doc got the possibility to link to struct members . (GNOME bug 565126)
• The deskbar-applet bookmark search will also look at epiphany topics . (GNOME bug 572291)
• In glib Alexander Larsson modified g_content_type_guess to never sniff desktop files when the filename is known. In other words, only allow desktop files with the .desktop extension and when the filename isn’t known. This is a security precaution since desktop files can execute arbitrary code when launched and we don’t want to allow them to try and hide as another type. There is no legit reason to not have the .desktop extension anyway. (the .desktop issue is also being discussed in desktop-devel-list)
• Tracker got support for IPTC metadata in jpeg and tiff files.
• Sven Neumann gave some love to the GTK+ directfb support, applying some patches, fixing some issues.
• Epiphany has a new option to open new windows in tabs (only available as a gconf key for now ). (GNOME bug 571593)
• Christian Persch killed the custom OBox widget from gnome-panel as GtkBox now supports changing the orientation.
• The balance bar in the new volume control will now instant-apply . (GNOME bug 566423)
• Metacity got totally rid of metacity-dialog, and will now use zenity to present dialogs . (GNOME bug 521914)
• Vinagre got updated to allow IPv6 address on the command line and in the connection dialog.
• Rygel is getting ready for a new release, several changes here, notably the response for seekable media request is now sent buffer by buffer so the whole file is not put into memory.
• And finally, a pythonconsole plugin, based on the gedit plugin, landed in eog.

• In Conduit, John Stowers added a new dataprovider that changes the desktop wallpaper, and suggests connecting to a flickr RSS feed…
• Sound Juicer media support has been ported from libnautilusburn to libbrasero-media . (GNOME bug 567286)
• After much testing Behdad Esfahbod removed the ClassDef->Defined field in Pango, and the associated special-handling code; he wrote “The special-casing was consuming lots of memory. EIGHT MEGABYTES for loading DejaVu Sans! While this could be complete fixed, I decided to remove the special-handling code altogether. I don’t think it will make any real difference, and if it does, we’ll fix fonts.”; in another commit he also saved over 2000 alloc calls when loading DejaVu Sans.
• Deskbar got an OpenSearch module . (GNOME bug 528184)
• Cosimo Cecchi implemented write support for the ObexFTP gvfs backend . (GNOME bug 519071)
• Following libnotify acceptance as an external dependency, Empathy got support and will now show a popup notification when receiving a new message.
• Ryan Lortie added _async functions for GDataInputStream (async versions of read_line and read_until ). (GNOME bug 568575)
• file-roller got ported to use gtkbuilder instead of libglade.
• A good bunch of memory leaks were fixed in brasero.
• The Volume Control balance widget got updated to use the new GTK+ scale marks.
• Banshee got a basic clutter UI for rendering the video texture from the clutter sink in the media pipeline.
• Theppitak Karoonboonyanan went on building modules out of their source trees and filed bugs and patches against those failing, many of those issues are already fixed (in gnome-settings-daemon, Ekiga, Brasero and gnome-keyring).
• Callum McKenzie finally killed the last bit of libgnome in gnome-applets; and returned the mixer applet.
• Long standing GTK+ bug (lastly spotted in a post on Planet Gnome by Ruben Vermeersch) got nailed with a patch from Simos Xenitellis . (GNOME bug 162726)
• Rhythmbox improved its handling of transcoding format selection for MTP devices, now preferring MP3 over M4A/AAC . (GNOME bug 567524)
• Pavel Kostyuchenko work on Anjuta/Glade3 integration (part of GSoC, see project his proposal) finally got commited . (GNOME bug 542412)

• After support for icons has been added in GTK+ last week (and I forgot to note it), Matthias Clasen added a section in the documentation on porting from SexyIconEntry.
• libgnome dependency got removed from sound-juicer, libgnome/libgnomeui from gfloppy, and bonobo from the Anjuta toolbar.
• Nemiver variable inspector widget now remember history of the variables . (GNOME bug 536259)
• Evince got its printing system reworked, making the GUI responsive during printing, with progress information . (GNOME bug 482770)
• The system log viewer in gnome-utils has been rewritten by Cosimo Cecchi.
• Metacity got the “Maximize” shortcut to act as “Restore” for maximised windows.
• Epiphany/gecko got some Gecko 1.9.1 fixes, and Epiphany/webkit can now open new links in new tabs thanks to the new Policy Decision system in WebKit.
• The new GNOME Volume Control got a few alert sounds (bark, drip, glass and sonar).
• Rhythmbox switched to a normal GtkTooltip, rather than a custom arrangement of widgets in a SexyTooltip

• Many modules saw development releases for 2.25.1.
• The libgnome dependency got removed from gnome-power-manager, and gnome-utils (dictionary, screenshot, logview) removed it as well as the dependency on libgnomeui.
• In the same vain, seahorse-plugins removed its gnome-vfs dependency.
• William Jon McCann commited a new volume control using PulseAudio, deprecating the old gst-mixer one.
• Behdad Esfahbod worked quite a bit on gnome-settings-daemon and blogged about the improved login time he achieved.
• Benjamin Berg added a Clearlookstest theme, as he proposed on desktop-devel-list several weeks ago, it is not enabled by default though.
• Seed, GObject-Javascript bridge, was finally revealed by Robert Carr on gtk-devel-list.
• brasero got a nautilus extension, based on current nautilus-cd-burner.
• John Carr commited support for git mirrors to jhbuild (support for bzr mirrors coming soon).

I asked Robert Carr some questions about Seed, and its relation to GJS, as they both bridges gobject and javascript, using the mighty gobject-introspection infrastructure; he confirmed he had been in contact with the GJS developers and pointed out some differences:

[Seed is different than GJS] Notably how we handle inheritance (GJS doesn’t). Also “out” arguments from functions we set properties on objects passed in, while GJS returns arrays. Then there are also some other differences with exceptions, signals and a few various things. In addition Seed does some stuff GJS doesn’t (uses libffi to box JavaScript functions into C function pointers, for functions like pango_fontset_foreach), and I’m sure GJS does some stuff that Seed doesn’t.

So compatibility would be an awkward issue at this point in time, so it seems to me like it’s best for both projects to continue development at this point, and once things are more fleshed out, it might become clear what approaches make more sense.

We’ve definitely talked about implementing a common embedding API though, and maybe after one more release it would be good to look at compatibility more.

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