Morten Welinder

I’ll happily add myself to the chorus: switching to SVN? Someone must
have been drinking out of the potty.

If we are going to suffer the pain of a conversion, then we have better get a lot out of it.

• Retraining. We all know cvs’ quirks. (And my fingers like to type c-v-s.)
• Lost history. None of the conversion tools are perfect.
• Recoding. Custom scripts will have to be recoded.

These apply to all systems (except cvs). The trouble with SVN
is that it is hard to see it as more than a stepping stone.

Dave, if the only argument that people have against it is that “everyone knows that distributed’s better” is what you believe, then you have not been listening. Start with KeithP’s write-up saying, in part, that (1) SVN lacks corruption detection,
(2) Git is a whole lot faster than SVN, and (3) SVN is a space pig compared to Git.

By the way, why is it relevant whether most distributions include the system by default? We expect, from time to time, that developers have HEAD versions of various off-site libraries, so surely we can get the same developers to obtain a recent copy of Git (etc.), right?

So can we please have git and gitweb running somewhere on gnome.org
with access to, say, ~user/public_git/ directories? I promise that I will not complain too much about SVN if that happens.

I have been trying out f-spot recently and I must say that using
it gives me one of those rare warm fuzzy feelings inside.

It has well designed interface with relatively little clutter.
It by and large does what I want it to.
And it does not crash or hang for me.
It does not even spew a lot of scary warnings in my session log file.

I can find nits, sure I can. In fact I just filed a pile of them, but we are talking the would-be-nice department here.

• Tagging an image should not cause a re-render.
• I want to be able to assign hot keys for tags.
• I want f-spot to detect duplicate images.
• Ctrl-+ ought to work for zooming in.

Nice job on this, guys!

Until recently I have been using xterm and twm. Call me a stone-age
throw-back if you like, but those two are fast and lean.

But I am giving gnome-terminal and metacity a spin now. Metacity
suffers somewhat from click-to-focus, even if you set
it to focus-follows-mouse, but that is a story for another day.

Today it is gnome-terminal gripe time. Ok, so it is actually not
too bad, but it feels slow. Starting the first terminal window,
for example, takes a few seconds. Seconds! I want my window to
show up in less than .2 seconds.

A bit of stracing reveals the cause. It is dlopen-ing a zillion modules related to character support.
That is used to populate a, I estimate, rarely used menu. In my humble opinion, the penalty for this kind of thing should not be taken on startup, but when the rarely-used feature is activated. Or in the background while I type away happily. Luckily this does not seem
too hard to fix.

On top of this, Fontconfig is doing a whole lot of work on startup.
It does that for other GTK+ based programs too, so I doubt the
applications are to blame. So what does it do?

• Stats ~200 directories all over the place.
• Feels the need to do things three times:

  access("/etc/fonts/suse-hinting.conf", R_OK) = 0
  stat64("/etc/fonts/suse-hinting.conf", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=6575, ...}) = 0
  open("/etc/fonts/suse-hinting.conf", O_RDONLY) = 18
  

  Are you there? Are you there? Please open! This kind of behaviour
  is fairly cheap on a local file system, but not necessarily so on
  a remote one. And it is wrong: the file could have changed twice between the three calls.

• Zig-zag reading files:

  read(17, "     fd9 78563412    1    4    4"..., 255) = 255
  lseek(17, -136, SEEK_CUR)               = 158
  read(17, "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/us"..., 4109) = 3938
  lseek(17, -3909, SEEK_CUR)              = 187
  read(17, "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/us"..., 4109) = 3909
  lseek(17, -3880, SEEK_CUR)              = 216
  read(17, "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/uni/us"..., 4109) = 3880
  lseek(17, -3851, SEEK_CUR)              = 245
  

  Back-and-forth over the same area again and again. Short of timing
  system call overhead I do not see what it is doing.

I am also having problems with focus in the terminal. I am not entirely sure how I manage, but
somehow the focus ends up on one of the tabs where it has no business being.

If you click on the column header of a regular treeview, the
entries will get sorted by the values in that column.

That works fine for the file chooser, at least if you sort by
filename.

It works horribly for programs like Banshee that display a long
list of (artist,album,song) entries. Sort by artist, according
to the treeview, means something like “sort by artist, and insofar
two entries’ artist values agree, pick a random ordering”.
That is useless! (It is a different matter whether Banshee has
the right interface for its song list. Add a few thousand songs
and I have the feeling the UI will suffer.)

To be useful, one ought to have the option of telling the treeview
that sorting by artist really means to sort by the (artist,album,song)
tuple.

So what am I not seeing?

I have noticed some trends in how the “severity” field in Gnome’s Bugzilla is being
used at the initial bug reporting time. Basically, “enhancement” is being used mostly right (although it has little to do with severity) and the others can be interpreted
in the following way:

Blocker: It happened to me.

Critical: I do not know how I can go on living if
you do not drop everything in your hands and fix the cosmetic problem
I believe I am seeing. Right now.

Major: This might become a problem for me
at some point in the future.

Normal: I did not see the option when I filed the bug.

Minor: Rarely used.

Trivial: I saw it happen to someone else.

Now, if someone could please tell me why we let non-maintainers
set the “priority” field…