Martyn Russell

I haven’t done much on Gossip in a while. Been rather preoccupied with Tracker recently.

Today I managed to add a feature which uses the text under the mouse pointer to search with Google, Wikipedia and Youtube. Right now those are just hard coded, but I had in mind, to make it configurable.

Web Services

Recently I set up a new blog for GTK+ to document releases and for people to blog about cool new things in GTK+. So far, there is just Andreas and myself on the blog. So if anyone else wants to be added just let me know your blog email account and I will set it up. If you have been missing the GTK+ project news, don’t forget, it can be see at http://planet.gnome.org/news/, it is not shown on the regular http://planet.gnome.org/.

Andreas has been doing a great job chasing up some final issues on gtk.org, mainly with regards to the language bindings. Andreas has now removed all bindings that have no support for 2.6 and above and all bindings which are supported by GNOME are illustrated nicely too. So, if your language binding isn’t listed there and you know it is supported, please let us know on the gtk-devel list so we can rectify the pages!

I started working on the new design for gtk.org last April and tonight the new pages were uploaded and we now have a spiffing new look which I am really happy with.

I want to thank Andreas Nilsson for helping out with the design and Tim Janik for help with the final touches in getting the pages installed, not to mention everyone who commented.

I’ve just caught up on the last 100 blogs I have been neglecting for the last week or so (due to being quite busy recently) and I think it is sad to see people so easily offended by blogs from people like Miguel and Davyd.

I think people miss the point. People blog about what they want to blog about. It is the writer’s choice to write what they want as much as it is the reader’s choice to read what they want.

Feel free to ignore my blog

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/

FOSDEM

FOSDEM was a hoot this year. I didn’t get a chance to see many talks but I did get a chance to meet people I haven’t met before like Xavier Claessens who is writing the Telepathy backend for Gossip and Nat Friedman who was also experiencing his first time at FOSDEM. It was good to see Nat and find out what he is up to since things have been quiet there for a while. I also met up with Ralph Meijer.

GTK+ Maintenance

I attended the GTK+ talk which was interesting. I don’t think people are really aware of the problems we are having with GTK+ at the moment with the lack of resources to keep things ticking along.

WE NEED GTK+ MAINTAINERS.

Also discussed was GTK+ 3.0 and if we should break API/ABI compatibility to clean up the code and remove deprecated cruft. I agree that we should do this since I believe it makes maintaining the project easier. This can also be done in stages to cause less interruption to users.

Finally, Gossip now has the TELEPATHY branch work available on trunk after Xavier Claessens merged the two tonight.

You can see the full announcement here:
http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/gossip-dev/2007-January/009099.html

I would especially like to thank:

• Xavier Claessens
• Eitan Isaacson
• Raphael Slinckx
• Sjoerd Simons

They have all worked very hard to help make this happen and of course thank you to the Telepathy team for their support along the way.

Here is a glimpse of what is currently available (bear in mind the interface is generated and needs some love

I have spent an hour or so this past few days updating my maintainer python script so it would work with the new Subversion repository. I must say, thanks for all the hard work that has gone into the move. The whole experience is now much nicer and faster with Subversion.

http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/maintainer

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!