Month: January 2006

I know this is not too important, but I like removing old cruft from our new shiny releases. Something I noticed when I adopted gnome-terminal was the remnants of .applications files, the predecessors of our current .desktop files, to which we migrated for FreeDesktop.org compliance. These are now totally obsolete unless we want to support older versions of GNOME with the current applications, which is kind of impossible for a number of other reasons, and would be broken, considering the number of applications that no longer ship such files.

I thought it would be really nice if we could kill /usr/share/application-registry now, so I mailed desktop-devel-list about it and got some very good feedback (i.e. all but one of the modules in the desktop release are fixed). Now, I’ve issued an evil find from hell on our CVS repository, piped the result to some commands, and have reached a probably useful list of modules still shipping .applications files, which are fortunately few: http://www.gnome.org/~gpastore/applications-list.txt.

Come on, it should not take long to get rid of them, let’s do it!

I must say it has been extremely fun to take care of gnome-terminal since I claimed it on desktop-devel-list on January 4th. I hope I am not doing too bad a job as its new maintainer and, in case I am, people are welcome to tell me. Now, after releasing 2.13.1 little time after I took it over mainly because of a rather annoying bug introduced in 2.13.0, and after some more time of pregnancy, I could not give birth to the latest and coolest release of gnome-terminal ever.

I had worked on it, but there were some basic features I would really like to implement for 2.14, and I would barely have time to release the tarball on time for GNOME 2.13.5. Hence, I rushed to come up with some simple patches for roughly implementing some things I wanted, and applied some not-too-good patches after checking they were not too disruptive, and asked someone else to do the release for me (huge thanks to Emmanuele Bassi for doing it). The result, as you may guess, was pretty good: a reasonable amount of cool new and fixed stuff, together with a ton of bugs in my Inbox the following morning. Sorry for that.

Most of them were duplicates, at least, and there are basically two issues, one of which has already been fixed. The other ones (e.g. the huge tabs) are being worked on, and should land on CVS HEAD quite soon. Please bear with me. =) But really, besides this round of bizarre bugs, it’s pretty nice, please try it out!

It’s a pity and it’s frustrating, but Atomix has not been accepted in the desktop release for 2.14. After struggling to fix it and improve it, hearing that “it isn’t being given attention” and not getting it into the release are definetely not the best things that could happen. Perhaps also because it is of some kind of sentimental value to me, as that was the module that introduced me to GNOME development, but it’s not all that bad, in the end… Some distributions already ship it by default, mainly those focused on “Edutainment”, and I’ve heard of Brazilian schools using it, even the Win32 port.

But I guess I’ll just have to live with it…

To those of you who do not read gnome-announce-list, or for those who do and wondered what “Include formulas of all compounds in the interface” meant, Atomix, the nice molecule puzzle game, 2.13.4 is out!.

The highlight of this release is something that had been requested some time ago, and that was relatively easy to implement thanks to Pango markup. As people say, an image is more worthwhile than a thousand words:

Suggestions are, of course, greatly appreciated! Enjoy!

And so on Monday I mailed devel-announce-list after someone requested a CVS account to work on a certain module and I could not find out who the maintainer of the module was because it did not have a MAINTAINERS file.

The result we have got so far is pretty motivating: 20 new or updated MAINTAINERS files so far. Thanks to all those who took prompt action after the announcement, you rock! However, allow me to remind everyone that there are over 800 modules hosted on cvs.gnome.org, of which approximately 600 did not have a MAINTAINERS file at all. There is still a looooong road ahead of us; for the good of our users and the mental sanity of our beloved sysadmins, let’s please get moving with this!