Hackfest Update
4. December 2010
Day 1
We ended up doing a lot of planing of how to organize things and ran into quite some discussion. One of the surprisingly difficult points was to define what the “GNOME Platform” is. In the end we came up with this (and a lot more):
- Create a central entry point for developer documentation
- Add a platform overview
- Write 10-minute-tutorials for the most important libraries with interesting examples. Of course we won’t be able to create all of them (especially not in out five target languages: C, C++, Python, Vala, Javascript) but we try to come up with some that can be extended over time.
Day 2
Today (well, yesterday) we finally started to get things done. Phil and Andreas worked on creating the platform overview page and templates for the 10-minute-tutorials. Most of the others started to write cool small applications in different languages show-casing our platform and make tutorials out of what they wrote.
After lunch, Shaun gave a very nice introduction to mallard and André decided to port the evolution docs to mallard, but he didn’t finish it (yet).
The worked quite nice for C and Vala but Jon and Jonh ran into many introspection issues and Jon got really annoyed by trying PyGI with cairo but he is making progress now.
In the meantime, Fréderic worked on secret improvements for library.gnome.org but I will leave it to him to present those.
Some impressions:
Snowy, eh, Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest started
2. December 2010
After we had a great dinner (thanks Openismus) with most people already there yesterday, the hackfest will officially starting today. Everything is well prepared except that weather which is super cold here in Berlin.
Help making glade ready for 3.0
15. November 2010
Our beloved interface designer used in about any non-trivial GNOME development isn’t really in a good shape for 3.0 currently:
- Doesn’t build against 3.0 libraries
- Doesn’t include all the fancy new GTK+ widgets: GtkComboBoxText and friends
Even worse that really few people are working on it, most important Tristan, but he is busy making GTK+ awesome and so has little time to fix things up. And in addition, glade is one of those many applications that aren’t trivial to port to GTK+ 3.0 because they use a lot of API that has been deprecated while not having an obvious replacement.
While taking about all the bad things there is some light on the horizon. I created the offscreen-gtk3 which can be build against the latest GTK+ stack. It even starts up and you can see windows, unfortunately though you cannot see any widgets because the offscreen rendering is broken. Offscreen rendering is needed as glade cannot any longer embed GtkWindows directly as GTK+ expects windows to have no toplevel and GTK_WIDGET_SET_FLAGS to hack around this is gone. The basic idea is to render everything to an offscreen window and then embed it inside the glade window. In the past hours I played a bit with this but couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
So, this is your turn: For experienced GDK/GTK+/Cairo hackers it shouldn’t be too difficult to make this working. If you have an idea that works, just commit it to that branch. When we have a half-way working glade I am pretty sure it will be possible to add the remaining widgets and make a rocking release for 3.0!
Mark Shuttleworth on Planet GNOME
17. September 2010
If you wonder, there already is a discussion on this bug report.
GNOME Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest taking place!
16. September 2010
Today, I got the long awaited approval mail from the board for the hackfest (well, for the travel sponsership for people attending). This means the hackfest will take place as planned from
December 2nd to December 5th 2010
This also means this is your last change to think about attending! All the people listed in the wiki should have received additional information about the next steps. If not or if you have any questions, please contact me!
“We have no plans to fork GNOME”
10. August 2010
Andreas Proschofsky made an interview with Jono Bacon that is really worth reading.
Some comments on this from my side:
Actually that’s all upstream work, it’s just that Ayatana is the upstream
Well, it is not. If you customize an upstream project (GNOME) you cannot call your result upstream anymore, it is downstream. And Jono doesn’t mention that Canonical requires copyright-assignment for all of the parts of Ayatana.
Update: My original wording was: “Technically upstream means not done by a distribution (downstream)” which seems to have led to some confusion so I try to clarify that.
Historically a lot of the work has been done in upstream GNOME but that’s changing
Prove? I don’t think it’s changing even if Canonical probably wants to change that.
So sure it’s a delicate situation but it’s the same with Red Hat building GNOME Shell which is a completely different user experience to GNOME.
As I think that Jono knows better I wonder why he is oversimplifying things here. While GNOME Shell is pushed by Red Hat everybody was invited to contribute and there is also a community of people not working for Red Hat that is heavily contributing to the Shell. GNOME Shell is not a Red Hat project.
Part of it is the fact that the design team that we’ve got working on Ubuntu has a different set of ideas. So besides the mobile space – where we are building a new User Experience with Unity – the focus for Ubuntu is GNOME with these additions.
I think everybody in GNOME would love to work together with the Canonical design team (and luckily it is happening sometimes). If they would present different ideas how they see the future of GNOME (Shell) there would be really nice discussion IMHO.
Conclusion
I really don’t mean to say that Canonical is evil because that would be unfair. They support GNOME in various ways with sponsership, patches, bug-reports and ideas.
As they are a company aiming on making money I can kind of understand their strategy on trying to be better, more innovative and different from other Linux distributions. This is their legal goal with Project Ayatana and it is one of the reasons they do not care too much about pushing things upstream.
But I think they make a mistake if they think that they can replace thousands of volunteers working on upstream projects with developers they have to pay in-house. In short term this may lead to more innovation but in the long term they will suffer in quality and quantity. You might remember the story with Novell’s main menu which was also innovative but didn’t ever end up being widely used.
Anyway, it is far more important to look into the future than into the past. This will also mean that people should push upstream work and GNOME Shell on the Ubuntu Developer Summit and I am sure there are many people there who care a lot about GNOME and Ubuntu.
Save the icons
7. August 2010
Stop Vincent from removing these important icons from gnome-desktop module:
Be honest, can a desktop live without these?
Anjuta gains support for Python
5. August 2010
So, finally the Python plugin originally developed by Ishan Chattopadhyaya in GSoc 2009 has made it’s way into the master branch after some heavy modifications.?? As usual the auto-completion and calltips are fully asynchronous and won’t be in your way while typing. You need to have the rope libraries installed for it to work (and that’s not checked for now…) and they are used as backend. As I am not a Python programmer I cannot really say if the support is complete but it shows a reasonable amount of information. As python is not a strong-types language this are actually a bit tricky and all the dirty work is done inside rope.
Enough words, some screenshots:
Autocompletion
Calltips
Patches welcome…
All Python programmers are encouraged to test this, give feedback (Bugzilla) and ideally write patches to improve this.
(cross-posted on Anjuta News Blog)
GUADEC follow-up
2. August 2010
GUADEC
As others have mentioned, GUADEC was great. Thanks a lot to the organizers. Especially it rather felt like being part of a big family instead of just being a guest there. And I think that was the first GUADEC where people started dancing. So congratulation to Stephane, Lenka and Patricia for winning the dancing awards!
It is also always great that people not yet involved with GNOME come to GUADEC because they want to become a part of the project.
GNOME 3.0
With the discussion about delaying GNOME 3 and after watching the gnome-shell talks I wondered a bit if we go into the right direction. Actually, I think we do though nobody can say today if all this will be successful. My point is that we basically copied the desktop idea from others in the past years with little changes and little innovation. Now we really try to innovate which brings the risk of failure but also the big chance to really increase our market share. Remember that we had this 10×10 goals?
So, as conclusion, we might fail but at least we tried.
Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest
The wiki page has been updated to finally contain a date, which is 2nd to 5th of December 2010. This might still change if it causes problems for too many people, so please contact me if you cannot make it on that weekend. Also we still need sponsorship and I didn’t get an answer from the board, yet. Stay tuned!
Anjuta
While still trying to release a new development version of anjuta I mostly worked on getting the python support from GSoC merged. There is still a lot to polish but the basic stuff is now set up in the python-support branch and will hopefully hit master soon. This will eventually lead to auto-indentation, auto-completion and calltips for Python.
LinuxTag, Guadec and others
1. July 2010
If you look to the left you will see that after nearly four years on Planet GNOME I now have a hackergotchi (thanks Kat) and I am joining the famous hat fraction.
GUADEC
This is even more important because now you can finally find the person that broke half of your development environment at GUADEC because, yeah,
and I am
This is also a good place to remind you of the world-famous FreeFA cup where you can save the honour of your country. In the last years this has been lots of fun so be sure that you aren’t missing it.
Five Questions
1)Who are you and what do you do?
Sometimes, I really would want to know that 
On other days, I am a 25 year old student/trainee who currently builds trains for work and hacks on the GNOME Development Tools in his spare time.
2) How did you get into GNOME?
I wrote a patch…
3) Why are you coming to GUADEC?
It always much better to meet all the people you only now from blogs, IRC and mail in person. Most people in the GNOME community are actually pretty awesome and fun to hang out with. And don’t forget about the beer event of course…
4) In 1 sentence, describe what your most favorite recent GNOME project has been. (Doesn’t have to be yours!)
GNOME Shell (yeah, I know some people said this already), because it is the first time since about Windows 95 where someone really tried to reinvent the desktop user experience.
5) Will this be your first time visiting the Netherlands?
No, I have been to Amsterdam and I sailed on IJsselmeer twice. Nice country, a bit flat though.
LinuxTag
As Vincent already mentioned we had a nice talk at LinuxTag and there is also a (german) radio interview with me about GNOME3.
Was fun to talk to some people, especially to one of the KDevelop developers who faces about the same problems as we do: There are 10 people working full time on QtCreater while Anjuta and KDevelop probably have 5 spare time contributers each 
Awesome though, that we are still competitive 