My blogspace

So what were the earlier seasons about?

• #1 - The ORB wars (”How to OOM fast - though components sound fun!”)
• #2 - You can really *scale* this icon on the desktop (”Janitor vs. leaky barge”)
• #3 - Bonobites vs. eazelites (”Set copenhagen on fire”)
• #4 - From steering committee to foundation (”From the blackest night into murky waters”)
• #5 - Breaking the chains (”Who needs a stable branch”)
• #6 - Piecing it together (”Everone needs a 2.0″)
• #7 - The long and stable road (”Time based is everything”)
• #8 - Watch that language (”To which evil empire do we succumb”)
• #9 - Idiots with misshapen features (”To place a window or not place a window”)

I’m sure we still have a few more seasons in us so let’s get back to work. Mmm where’s that chocolate…

Every time I see clouds brewing on the horizon I visit this site to get myself a good laugh:
http://www.illusionary.com/GNOMEvKDE.html

Update: I did not mean that we shouldn’t take the issue at hand seriously at all. I surely will. Bad choice of title on my end and probably bad choice of analogies too. Sorry Jeff, in no way think you deserve to be characterized the way Murray did. There has to be better ways for us to settle differences between people and groups within the community than this…

Just put out some releases for 2.20.1

libgnome/libgnomeui 2.20.1: Some nice fixes for the file chooser by Federico and friends

libbonobo 2.20.1: Matthias plugged a couple leaks

gconf 2.20.1: Minor stuff

ORBit2 2.14.10 : Jules Colding did a whole lot of fixing in the GIOP code

I finally got off my ass and moved my old blogs from advogato and pyblosxom to blogs.gnome.org. Hopefully this will help improve the blog frequency too

Benoit, sorry for encouraging Mariano to release a fixed tarball for you. I should have waited until you could do it yourself, and I take full responsibility for bypassing you and not following due process.

The incentive was never anything but to have a working tarball in the 2.18.0 beta, so I hope we can still use the end result since the changes made were trivial and only affected docs.

Please reconsider banning the tarball, and again, sorry for the confusion

This is your unique chance to prove for us that the spam prevention solution set up to protect my mail address here: kjartan.maraas@pilot.oslo.kommune.no is worth the cost.

If you want to do this for the rest of the mail addresses in that domain do not hesitate to contact me on the above mail address to get a copy of our mail address database.

Thanks kindly for all your help

Note to self: I really need to get my act together on the blog end and get myself set up with some software to help make it easy. If anyone sees a no.po file in GNOME CVS anywhere please lead me in the right direction so I can exterminate it for Joe’s pleasure.

So, four months passed and another release went out the door. I need to get into more regular blogging it seems. The real reason I’m writing this today is to get one of those fancy lookin’ pirate adornments

Started applying some patches for gnome-terminal this weekend and I was glad to see Dennis commited his HIGification patches too. They’ve been sitting in bugzilla for way too long. Also commited Alan Horkan’s patch to free unused fonts early so on the whole gnome-terminal should be using less memory than ever in HEAD CVS.

On that note I think we really need to blow some life into the memory reduction work again, or at least do some publicity work since it seems to have slowed down a bit again. The wiki page is there and people should feel free to add tasks and thoughts there at any time. I think we’re in better shape than ever though, so maybe that’s the reason the effort seems to have been slowing down.

Going to go through bugzilla for the modules I’m involved with the most and make sure every UI and string related patch gets in early this cycle and I urge all maintainers to do the same. We’ve had string changes and HIG fixes sitting in bugzilla for many release cycles without getting them commited which is bad. I’m also going to drop off the all-bugs alias for a while since it’s just way too much mail to handle and just becomes a time sink.

Got most of jhbuild running now but there are still problems:

- mozilla doesn’t install the nss headers so I had to copy them from mozilla/public/nss and mozilla/private/nss to $(prefix)/include/mozilla-{$MOZILLA_VERSION}/nss to get evolution-data-server to build
- librsvg fails to build with gcc4 because of -Werror being set
- nautilus-cd-burner needs a patch to work with the latest HAL
this is available in the fedora core rawhide srpm
- gstreamer doesn’t build with api docs
- gal doesn’t pass make install because of some problem in with the api docs
- gal installs gal.pc but evolution is looking for gal-2.6.pc

I’ve been trying to get a full jhbuild running for GNOME 2.12 lately and ran into a couple of problems which should be fixed now hopefully.

There are a few problems with building API docs here and there, and a couple of other issues that I have commited fixes for like broken translations and regular build fixes. Johan also commited a fix for jhbuild to use HEAD of hal and dbus for 2.12 and the stable branches for 2.10. Seems to be working just fine here at least.

I’ll continue to work towards getting a full build running with no problems and file bugs against modules with problems and workarounds where I can find those.

Couldn’t make it to GUADEC this year for various reasons, but I miss being there and look forward to seeing you all next time, if not earlier somewhere. Enjoy the conference! We’ll be drinking beer Irish style agaian before you know it

So it looks like the 2.8.3 release went mostly ok. The 2.10.0 work definitely rocks and the wiki is really alive and cooking these days.

After 2.8.x I’ve spent most of my time running valgrind on GNOME and it’s looking good so far. A few leaks found and some other cases of bogus memory management fixed. I also started porting some pieces away from the deprecated widgets and doing general cleanups in various modules. There’s a lot of cruft all over the place that should be excised.

On the topic of header includes - we have tons of files that do things wrong here. It would be nice if the coding style guidelines for GNOME said something about this in my opinion.
The de-facto standard seems to be to:

• include <config.h> first in every C-file
• avoid having <config.h> in other headers
• start at the bottom of the stack when ordering includes

This gives something like what we see in GTK+:
#include <config.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <glib.h>
#include <glib/gprintf.h>
#include <gobject/gvaluecollector.h>
#include “gtkalias.h”
#include “gtktreemodel.h”
#include “gtktreeview.h”
#include “gtktreeprivate.h”
#include “gtkmarshalers.h”

Also, I think it’s mostly agreed on that including the specific header you need from a library is better than to include the catch-all headers like <gtk/gtk.h>, <libgnome/libgnome.h>, <gnome.h> and so on.
It definitely makes it clearer what parts of a library is being used in the file at least, which is a good thing when trying to port to newer widgets later on.

The sparsing, valgrinding and cruft-excising tour is coming to a module near you real soon now ™

Update

Sven Neumann pointed out to me that using the specific headers was ok within a library but that the catch-all headers are the documented way to use GTK+ at least. Thanks for that clarification.
The point I tried to make was that there’s room for improvement when it comes to following *any* standard from what little I’ve seen in CVS.

Finally took the time to get GNOME 2.8.3 out the door. Not too far behind schedule this time either. It has a whole bunch of bug fixes in almost every module in there.

I also filed reports with the patches for vte from fedora in GNOME bugzilla so we have them archived. Put up a test tarball at http://www.gnome.org/~kmaraas/vte-0.11.12.tar.gz so please test that one if you have issues with the current release. This tarball is really just current CVS + patches from Fedora.

Played 9-ball badly last night, but it was fun anyway. Just need to get in the zone for this weekend and I’ll be all set