Another rant about nothing

This year I’ve had lots of mixed feelings about Glade 3.6 … The bright side of things is that despite some regressions and even if some of the feedback we get is negative – alot of people are still using Glade 3.6 and leveraging at least some of the new features available with GtkBuilder (ofcourse only a few loose strings can make entire features unusable, like tight GtkTextBuffer/GtkTextView integration for a random example), but Im still really happy for this – its a shame we missed out on tying up GtkActionGroups so far but I think some people might already be doing some interesting stuff with GtkActivatable/GtkAction associations.

Some things do make me sad, and if you are reading this and I snapped at you in the past for some bugzilla comment that I found was not helpful to me at the time, sorry about that. The truth is I bit off more than I could chew, and for some reason I imagined that picking up the pieces after releasing 3.6 would be different.

The bugmail I received this morning was kindof disheartening, this bug was probably one of the most imporant and most annoying bugs still open since the release of 3.6, it was filed in April.

It took me 20min. to fix including the changelog entry, and it took me more time to beat up git and make a fresh checkout/commit and go comment/close the bug … and the core is like 100% documented … and I usually answer my emails …

Well I think Glade has big big potential personally, but sadly the potential is (potential * 0) if people are so scared to fix the bug in Glade, that they need to integrate a script into the build to reinterpret Glade’s xml output to fix the bug locally instead.

Anyway I wish you all luck, theres another big decade coming up for the those who will do this thing all over again, I dont know if or how much Im gonna be there but man, its important to be a crew and stick together, set your objectives together, get funding together, rock the gnome crew logo, leverage it and do something really revolutionary. I doubt the traditional competitive every man for himself attitude inherent in the free software domain is going to cut it this time.

And PEACE OUT !

6 Responses to “Another rant about nothing”

  1. Raphael says:

    :D You guys rock.

  2. Pavel says:

    I think this is an example how Gobject bites you. Did you notice that the guy written his script in Python? Maybe he also just uses Glade from Python.
    And for a Python programmer Gobjectified C code just looks like the ugliest Perl code to you. So please dont jump onto too quick conclusions…

  3. Philip Peitsch says:

    Just wanted to say don’t give up hope as well :)

    Glade is an integral part of Ubuntu’s new Quickly suite… and one of my favourite programs under linux.

    I wasn’t aware it didn’t have a good dev community working on it… I will definitely keep my eyes open for potential to scratch my own itches :) .

    What’s the best way to contribute patches to you?

  4. tvb says:

    Hi, thanks thats really very flattering.

    The best way to send a patch will be in bugzilla.gnome.org, product:glade3.

    send any questions you might have to glade-devel@ximian.com, I’m often on irc
    but list activity somehow seems help the project in itself.

    I was going to say in so many words: man theres a mountain of problems in that
    buglist, more than Glade has seen since I worked on it, and its because of all the
    GtkBuilder support that came all at once, with little or no testing or review, its
    mostly working ok under the hood, but on the surface its really immature.

  5. Glade rules. I’ve used it in the past for a few small PyGtk projects, and I wouldn’t want to go back to assembling widgets by hand in code.

  6. Richard says:

    Yah, while Glade remains somewhat rough, it is also delightfully powerful and capable. Thanks for helping provide so useful a tool! There are things I’d like to patch, there’s just never enough time for everything :(

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