Martyn Russell

Over the past month or so I have had a few contributions to the maintainer python script I started writing a while back to help maintainers with the laborious tasks carried out during a release.

Lucas Rocha sent me a great patch for including the help manual translators to the release note generated.

Xavier Claessens is using the script for his Empathy releases and added support for getting the project website (and adding it to the release note) and making it possible to run the “install-module” script on master.gnome.org.

So thanks to both for their contributions!

I decided to add support for generating the email you send so all you have to do is literally click “Send”. It saves a lot of time and works quite nicely.

Try it out:
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/maintainer

For a while now we have had Telepathy support in Gossip based on the work that Xavier Claessens, Eitan Isaacson, Raphael Slinckx and Sjoerd Simons submitted. Recently Xavier decided to start his own project called Empathy using the Gossip user interface and as a direct result, we now have no one maintaining the Telepathy backend in Gossip.

The OTHER problem we have with Gossip at the moment is that it is not fun to hack on. I don’t think it is directly the result of integrating Telepathy into Gossip and I am not saying that Telepathy is the reason it is not fun to hack on, I think the same problem would exist had libgaim materialised and we were able to use that instead.

To summarise, the problem is really insufficient man power and the complexity of supporting multiple protocols.

Recently, Micke, Richard and I decided to remove the Telepathy integration completely and become a Jabber ONLY client. By doing this, we can focus on smaller, nicer and more useful features than just supporting another protocol.

For those that haven’t been reading the gtk-devel list I have spent some time recently reworking the GTK+ website pages. You can read the mail thread here:

• http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2007-May/msg00282.html

For those not interested in the debate, the first draft is available here:

• http://www.imendio.com/~martyn/gtk/