Rodrigo Moya

For the first time, I am mentoring a student for this year’s Google Summer of Code, who will be working on a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service.

Mario (ie, the student) seems to be a very motivated person, so I’m willing to see the results of his work this summer, and to have another future contributor to openSUSE and GNOME.

As for the mentoring itself, following Federico’s mentoring HOWTO should make things easier for me, so I hope to do a good job. More news about the project as things progress.

The discussion about how/where to put the activate-desktop-effects thing in the appearance capplet seems to not reach a good solution for all distros, at least for now, so, while waiting for a good solution for all upstream, and since in openSUSE desktop effects means compiz, I added a patch to the simple-ccsm openSUSE package to activate compiz directly from the same place where it is configured.

So, the ‘Desktop Effects’ icon in the GNOME control center:

starts now simple-ccsm, which contains a check box to activate/deactivate compiz.

The old ‘Desktop Effects’ capplet (aka gnome-xgl-settings) will soon die, since gnome-xgl-switch script has been moved to the XGL package, and the hardware database is already on a separate package.

For those who don’t follow openSUSE news, here’s a summary of what people did during hack week, including some nice GNOME-related things, as well as improvements for the openSUSE distribution.

Yesterday was the first day with Vincent Untz as a member of the openSUSE GNOME team. For those who don’t know him, he’s one of the top-involved persons in upstream GNOME, having been part of the Foundation board, the release team, and maintainer of several modules, etc, etc, so his role on the team will help a lot in making openSUSE and GNOME better.

Looking forward to see what he helps us getting to.

Last week was Hacking week at openSUSE, so here’s a summary of what I did:

• I moved all my OSM-related packages to the Application:Geo repository in openSUSE’s build service. And I added a couple of packages I needed to build maps for my GARMIN GPS unit: mkgmap and osmosis, which have helped me in making the first 100% free map of Spain for GARMIN GPS units Of course, the map is incomplete (compared to the P2P’ed maps GARMIN users in Spain use), but this should probably get more people to contribute to the maps. Here are some screenshots of the maps on a Que PDA (thanks to Miguel Blanco):
  
• I lost lots of time at the beginning of the week trying to make Mapper (a fork of maemo-mapper to provide more OpenStreetMap-oriented features) work, fixing some build problems (patches are upstream now) and packaging it. It still doesn’t work very well though, crashing a lot, but this will improve soon.
• I started working on a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service. Most of the time was spent doing tests with Python in general and the OSC Python API in particular, so the result is not that fantastic, but at least I’ve got now a good base from where to continue the work. You can find the (clean) work in my git repository:

  git clone http://www.gnome.org/~rodrigo/git/osc-plugins.git

  

I have been running with a 10.3 openSUSE system updated to FACTORY for some time now, but last week, I downloaded the boot ISO to test a fresh installation. And I was immediately delighted by the new installer, which seems to be the same as always but with a much better UI.

Release 2.21.5 for gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon are now ready for your testing pleasure. This is the first release of gnome-control-center depending on the standalone gnome-settings-daemon (which was previously part of gnome-control-center), which is also used by the new GDM.

Testing is largely needed, so please report bugs/suggestions/patches to either the gnomecc-list or Bugzilla.

Today’s packaging day at openSUSE, a good opportunity to get your hands dirty with the openSUSE build service, which allows people to build packages for many SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian versions, and to get your favorite piece of software packaged for your favorite distribution.

The action is taking place for the whole day at #opensuse-buildservice in irc.freenode.net. Also, if you prefer to get in contact with fellow GNOME packagers, #opensuse-gnome is the place to go, in the same network.

Some hints for people wanting to attend:

• Packaging standards for openSUSE
• Information about the build service
• You might want to have a try at osc-plugins-gnome, a set of plugins for OSC (the build service command line client) that will be integrated soon into OSC itself, and which offer extended functionality to deal with patches and spec files.
• GNOME packaging policy

In the last few days, we have been working on packaging PulseAudio for openSUSE Factory (what will be openSUSE 11.0), and here are the first results. This page contains instructions on how to run and test it, and Cyberorg’s blog contains more information and screenshots.

This starts to mark the end of our beloved esound, although GNOME still needs some work, which is one of our next steps, helping upstream GNOME in fixing all the issues.

I left last night jhbuild compiling all GNOME modules, included meta-gnome-proposed, to find this morning it failed on libtelepathy because of missing darcs in my system. Installed it and watched it work until it came to another module needing bzr, installed again, and then, a few minutes later, another module complained about missing mercurial. And so far, so good, but this makes 6!! (if not more, it’s still compiling ) version control systems needed to compile GNOME unstable, that is: CVS, subversion, git, mercurial, darcs and bzr.

While I have nothing against people writing/using their own tools for whatever they want, it started to look to me, exaggerating, of course, like the Linux distro market, where, if we continue the trend (fortunately, the number of distros is not increasing, like it did a few years ago), we’ll be having almost a distro per Linux user. So, although I don’t know in detail all of these VCSs to really understand why they all exist, is this really needed? Wouldn’t it be better to have 2 or 3 very good VCSs that fit most people’s needs? If not, I’ll write my own