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 !
😀 You guys rock.
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…
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?
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.
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.
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 🙁
Well, Glade does have its bugs and learning curve. I’ve spent the last week just making a dialog to get a couple numbers to add together. I noticed a half dozen bugs in Glade: some crashes leaving in unfixable states but mostly just nits.
So, how do we fix these? I took a guess and submitted a bug/patch on the smallest nit I could find (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607339). Still, it’s a guess that it goes anywhere. Glade seems to keep bugs in launchpad, glade.gnome.org, bugzilla, with source control under git and svn. As far as the log goes, it seems you are maintaining Glade by itself.
Is there a major future to Glade? The underlying GTK widgets appear fragile, as in the bug you mentioned. I mean, is it really Glade’s fault that an editable, numeric spin box doesn’t understand that typing a number outside of bounds is bad? Or that devhelp changed its undocumented search interface and also fails to account for its menu bar? I don’t know the future, but I send up the little patches I make to keep it running while I use it or even put together a better tutorial.
Hi,
First thanks for taking an interest and looking at the Glade project.
So, to try to answer all your questions … yes I am the sole maintainer of Glade, I’ve
had help on and off but unfortunately nobody “stuck”, which is essentially what drives
me nuts and makes me completely bored of developing Glade.
Glade keeps bugs in bugzilla.gnome.org, launchpad sometimes pushes bugs to bugzilla but
I’m not exactly sure how that works, for the record gnome bugs go to gnome bugzilla in
order to hit the inboxes of gnome developers. (and svn is old news, the active repository
is the git repo).
I’m not sure what to answer for is there a major future, here are some futures possible:
– Somebody finds the time to iron out some small kinks left and right, update Glade
for latest version of GTK+, fix some segfaults etc – this is doable for a single hacker
in his spare time over the course of 6 months, or a paid developer should take less
than a month to get a Glade that doesnt ever ever crash and doesnt have those
annoying glitches when trying to click on the i18n dialog from a treeview data
row editor which does custom focus handling etc etc.
Thats a really lame future, one which at this point really disinterests me.
The good scenario:
– We decide to do something with the code, and implement the stuff outlined
at http://live.gnome.org/Glade/Roadmap, the most important thing to do
to ensure that Glade has a “major future”; is to drop the GTK+ dependency from
the core, develop an at least basic Clutter plugin, an example plugin of Nbtk or
something like – maybe even push for toolkit libraries to maintain their own
plugin library to Glade (possible candidates could be GTK+/Clutter/goocanvas …).
Would also be a very good idea to start implementing the glue catalogs and figuring
how they would interact with the workspace (i.e. with a GTK+ and a Clutter catalog
running together, you want to embed back and forth, having the Clutter catalog
define the workspace toplevel for Clutter toplevels, and GTK+ define/create the
toplevel workspace widget for GtkWindow types).
Another thing important for the future but less urgent is the custom widget stuff outlined
in the roadmap, I’m convinced that already if we were to stay with boring GTK+ only, and
do some fancy integration with python or other bindings, possibly putting that code in
Anjuta or something, we could achieve the same level of integration that you get using
Interface Builder with Xcode on OSX, without being stuck with nextstep (Cocoa) – and creating
completely portable GTK+ code (so yes, I think to stay in the water for now we have
to AT LEAST BEAT OSX, since its so damn easy and within our grasp)
There are alot of milestones towards an awesome kickass version of Glade, and they really
arent that hard to achieve, but I need hackers, I need someone who is going to give me one night
a week for a year, or someone who is in between jobs and is going to crack down on a feature
for a month – a few of those, only a few – and we are back on our feet.
So thats the state of the union 😉
Cheers