andré klapper's blog.

Nine years after GNOME 2 we released GNOME 3 today.

It is a different way to do things, and that is intended. GNOME 3 is not GNOME 2. It’s a new concept.

Check the release notes and our videos for more info, and try it out on a live CD/USB stick.

Glad to see the first positive reviews already and flowers.

There’s way more good and new stuff around, for example the new website design, or developer.gnome.org providing quick coding introductions in several programming languages, or a new release of the GNOME Journal providing some more background info on GNOME 3.

And we’ll be having a release party in Prague/CZ on Saturday in case you’re around. Or check the full list of release parties to find one near your place and take a camera with you.

Enjoy GNOME 3, made of awesome. Celebrate and party, folks!

I just made it back to Central Europe and hereby post some random bits and pieces on those last days that I spent in Bangalore/India on a software project that I like.

Looks like we created some confusion on Friday by sticking to a certain date. I am sorry for that…, not‽

The magic vuntz fixed my non-booting laptop. He certainly has super powers.

For the records, I spent the last day of the Gnome.Asia hackfest on Friday mostly with some smaller stuff and GNOME 3.0 release notes related issues.

Indian food: ♥

After India won the cricket world championship I decided to increase my number of talks on random topics at the GNOME.Asia conference for yet another time. Here are some slides in PDF format under CC BY-NC-SA (ODP files also available in that folder):

• Contributing To Gnome User Documentation
• Contributing To Gnome Translation
• Bugsquadding in GNOME (I bought this talk for little money from a friendly Indian man that I met on the interwebs)

(You can find further presentation slides here.)

A great pleasure to finally meet Radhika and Atul in person after all those years of contact!

Unfortunately there was no video recording, otherwise I’d recommend to watch Chandni‘s talk about Contributions made by a newbie to Empathy. It was insightful and quite refreshing because of its “Just do it!” attitude.

And of course a big Thank you to the organizers!

So it’s official: We’ve decided at the GNOME.asia hackfest that we’re going to postpone GNOME 3.0 a bit. As written, one of the reasons is that the amount of remaining issues is simply too high.

While it’s disappointing to change plans that late after spending so much energy on pushing this on time, it’s probably still better than having a quite buggy release. Looking forward to having a great GNOME 3.0 in September…

After a great flight I arrived in sunny Bangalore yesterday and am going to spend some days at the Intel office and at Dayananda Sagar Institutions with over a dozen of brave, friendly and good-looking folks to work on GNOME3 that is going to be released in a week. The coffee and food is great, however I miss access to IRC (but webclients help).

And we’ll also have the GNOME.Asia conference at the weekend with more than a thousand attendants.

We kicked off the long first hackfest day by introducing each other and listing the plans what to work on. Some of us then discussed the gnome3.org website and marketing related stuff, the rest of the release-team and desrt were mostly hacking, and many others continued to plan this weekend’s conference.

A short summary of what I did today:

• commented on a GNOME3 press article draft
• fixed a potential upcoming small localization issue of the gnome3 website
• some clean-up and triaging of a bunch of tickets in Bugzilla (in website, bugzilla, vcs components/products)
• discussed with Allan “How to write good bug reports for GNOME” whether the How to report page is good enough, or whether there are usecases other than only filing a bug missing.
• planned the GNOME Bugzilla reorganization of classifications according to the new GNOME release modulesets together with bkor via Instant Messaging
  
  • moved quite a bunch of products in Bugzilla to the “Deprecated” classification
  • created “Core” classification and moved all included modules there
  • moved Extended Platform modules and Platform modules to “Platform” Bugzilla classification; moved deprecated platform stuff to the “Deprecated” Bugzilla classification; and moved remaining modules in “Platform” Bugzilla classification (gamin, libxml2, libxslt, phg-config, xml2po) to “Others” Bugzilla classification
  • created “Applications” classification for apps that were previously in the “Desktop” classification, and for other apps
  • removed the old “Developer Tools”, “Admin” and “Desktop” classifications (thanks for comments on their new homes for their modules to bkor, vuntz, fredp)

The results can be seen here.

Plan for tomorrow is some smaller Bugzilla reorg cleanups and start working on the presentations slides for the random-topic conference talks that I proposed (and which got accepted).

The GNOME release-team met yesterday and reviewed the blocker reports in GNOME Bugzilla by splitting them into “must-fix”, “should-fix” and “nice-to-have” categories. These are the results.

17 Blocker issues

Data taken from Bugzilla (bug reports with GNOME Target field set).

• caribou: Make it run on GNOME 3
• cheese: Cheese requires clutter-gtk-0.10 but latest is 1.0
• cheese: GTK 3 porting
• cheese: Make cheese widget work again
• gnome-control-center: add and remove printers
• gnome-control-center: datetime: Missing artwork
• gnome-panel: Minimize differences between 3.0 panel and gnome-shell
• gnome-session: avoid being locked into fallback by session saving
• gnome-shell: Experimental network manager applet
• gnome-shell: font size setting is ignored
• gnome-shell: Doesn’t suspend when in overview mode
• gnome-shell: Chat scrollbar needs to move to the bottom when new messages are received
• gnome-themes-standard: Toolbar doesn’t follow gtk 3 theme
• libgnomekbd: layout indicator issues
• metacity: Disable control-alt-d “”show desktop”” shortcut for GNOME 3
• metacity: sync window decoration style with mutter
• pygobject: Handle functions that take string+len args

26 Important issues that should get fixed for 3.0, however won’t block the 3.0 release.

Data taken from Bugzilla (bug reports with “[gnome3-important]” whiteboard entry).

• cheese: Cheese is not able to do live theora encoding
• empathy: Don’t use a status icon if the notification server supports persistence
• epiphany: Revamp download management UI
• evince: remove NoDisplay=true
• gdm: GNOME foot icon at login is lowres
• gnome-control-center: (Re-)Add checkbox for disable touchpad
• gnome-control-center: shell resizing issue
• gnome-icon-theme: Some icons missing in larger sizes (256×256)
• gnome-icon-theme: some rtl variants needed
• gnome-keyring: Password prompts don’t show up with an app name in GNOME 3
• gnome-panel: Port to GSettings
• gnome-screensaver: top bar != shell top bar
• gnome-session: remove SM crap for 3.0
• gnome-session: gnome-session-is-accelerated too slow
• gnome-shell: Calendar: UTC/localtime mixup
• gtk+: tabs not displayed correctly when they fill the screen
• gtk+: [gnome-terminal] When using theme colors,white-on-white text
• gtk+: [Tracker] Missing accessor functions
• gtk+: No way to programmatically update visual state of a button
• libgnomekbd: keyboard layout preview window issues
• metacity: Improve keybindings and descriptions
• metacity: Migrate to GSettings
• mutter: a11y: visual alert only works per-window, not screen
• orca: Migrate to GSettings
• orca: Make the gconf dependency optional
• pygtk: Remove deprecated GTK+ symbols

GNOME Bugzilla in 2010

As usual I posted a short activity summary for 2010.

Also quickly wrote up the GNOME Q4 quarterly report for the Bugsquad.

GNOME 3.0 blockers

Posted a first GNOME 3.0 blocker report (based on GNOME Bugzilla data). Planning to do this once per week now. Feedback welcome whether it’s helpful to see what’s still left on the way.

GNOME Evolution documentation rewrite

Created a wikipage to get the Evolution user documentation rewrite better documented and organized as I am afraid that at some point the complexity of this task might demotivate all involved folks (Phil Bull, April Gonzales, Barbara Tobias and me). Asked Novell to relicense the old manual so we can potentially reuse some good parts. Work is ongoing.

Google Code-In 2010/11

The Google Code-In contest has just ended today. It’s been a pleasure and I’d like to thank all students and mentors for participating. Hope we all had some fun together (I had), though we did not have that many tasks available (I can’t provide exact numbers as Google now just displays “This page is inactive at this time.” for the list of tasks, but comparing for example to KDE we had maybe half of their tasks). Also see my previous post for stuff that has been achieved.
I am very interested in feedback from non-mentors that considered adding a task but didn’t, mentors, and students to see what we can improve (e.g. in our wiki) for a potential next time – feel free to send me an email or add a comment to this blog entry.

Helsinki

I’m spending this week in Helsinki. Feel free to ping me for an evening beer.
And for more (and way cheaper) beers there’s also the GNOME Python hackfest next week (not that I suddenly started hacking Python, just that I should be in the same town), and FOSDEM in four weeks. See you around?

Two weeks ago I attended the GNOME Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest. Since then I’ve been working a bit on Mallard documentation for Evolution. It’s a complex task and I am happy that Barbara Tobias has offered her help. You can follow the development on gitorious.org. To take a look, clone it and run “yelp .” in the checkout directory.

Ignoring my own plan (something I already expected to happen when writing it up) I spent time thinking of structure and categorization of help topics and turned my “expressionist dance” drawing into a small but still confusing inkscape graphic that I’ve been enhancing over the last days while going through the old manual (the numbers in the picture refer to sections in the old manual):

Interesting sources for stuff to cover could be the FAQ, the old documentation (though the license is incompatible), the recent posts on the user mailing list, and recent bug reports that have been closed as INVALID (often because of misconfiguration issues or support questions instead of real software bugs).

I also hope to turn finishing some stub help pages into Google Code-In tasks. Yesterday I created the first task for documenting the search functionalities.

Help is welcome if you are brave enough to tame the beast.

This is a short status report at half-time of Google Code-In 2010/11 contest (3 weeks have passed and another 4 weeks to go until January 10th).
Most of the students do an awesome job! Just to highlight some of the tasks that have been finished:

• Translations: Lots of Greek and Romanian translations contributed – Nice boost.
• Marketing: Initial “Getting started with GNOME development” tutorial; Initial guide to Berlin for Desktop Summit 2011 attendees.
• Code: Some gedit plugins ported to libpeas; New gtksourceview languages files (Cobol, Go); Some pygobject patches; Snowy (see Natan’s latest blog post).
• Usability: A survey comparing the keyboard shortcuts of common functions in 15 GNOME applications and the HIG.
• Documentation: Vinagre and gnome-sudoku received initial Mallard formatted user help.
• User Interface: Icon drafts for Anjuta and Vinagre.

Currently 84 tasks are finished, 12 ongoing, and 22 available for students to work on. And we still accept tasks! Click here if you want to mentor ideas that you have, or click here if you want to take part as a student!