andré klapper's blog.

Apart from the missing code required to sync evolution-data-server’s contacts with Empathy (Nat once wrote an Evolution plugin for Pidgin but nowadays Empathy and the Telepathy stack are official part of the GNOME platform) I’ve spent an evening a few weeks ago thinking about how I’d expect integration of Instant Messaging in the Contacts User Interface of Evolution while having a beer in my favorite club. Calling the currently available options poor is an euphemism – they simply do not exist. Evolution developers have neither plans nor time to work on such stuff for Evolution 2.30 so I was in the mood to come up with some mockups of what I’d expect.

Sometimes I wish GNOME had a bounty program (either separate or integrated in Bugzilla) so I could say “If you code this as an Evolution Plugin and it gets accepted by maintainers you get xxx EUR”. That idea is obviously still missing mentors that help the coder with implementation issues though.

Evolution Mail Composer

Current Dropdown:

New Dropdown:

New Context Menu:

Evolution Contacts

Currently:

New, with context menus:

Propose your module for GNOME now

Module proposal period for the next GNOME release has started!

If you are a maintainer of a module that you want to propose for official inclusion in GNOME: Do it now! See the wiki for the guidelines. Also note that you will receive slightly less negative feedback if you avoid using deprecated modules (libbonobo/ui, libgnome/ui, libgnomecanvas, libart_lpgl, gnome-vfs, libgnomeprint/ui, esound, orbit, libglade) and deprecated Glib and GTK+ symbols. ;-)

And now another (last?) GNOME 3 status update before 2.28 will hit the streets…
See also the cleanup stats and the 2.27/2.29 schedule.

Killing Bonobo

If I got everything right I could create the following categories for the GNOME modules that still depend on Bonobo/Orbit:

• A11Y
  This seems to cover orca, dasher, gok, mousetweaks, accerciser and gnome-session. At-spi, gnome-mag and gnome-speech might die and get replaced by at-spi2, gnome-shell and speech-dispatcher. libgail-gnome has already died by getting integrated into gtk+ (Orca was the last consumer and got fixed two weeks ago).
  See here for a general overview.
• gnome-panel
  gnome-panel blocks the Bonobo dependencies of bug-buddy, gnome-applets, seahorse-plugins, pessulus, sabayon, gdm, and empathy. It is likely that gnome-panel will get replaced by gnome-shell for GNOME 3 (but there is no final decision yet).
• Evolution, Evolution-Data-Server, Evolution-Exchange
  Evolution and friends just branched for GNOME 2.28.x so the kill-bonobo and dbus-hybrid branches now can get merged into (unstable) master. After that it will be a bit easier to see how much work is left.
• gconf
  Probably very ugly to fix. dconf might be quite ready (but developers a bit too silent in communicating that). Crossing fingers for a status report. It could also make sense to switch to the gconf-dbus branch in the meantime.
• Legacy
  • gnome-python-desktop (as a binding)
  • glade3 (as a tool to create applications)
• Other modules that are not officially part of GNOME
  Wondering about atomix, balsa, ghex, gnumeric, gossip and gthumb.
  Bug reports are mostly filed (yes, we also do care about warning the maintainers of modules that use deprecated functionality and are not officially part of GNOME despite of sometimes unfriendly “I don’t care about your GNOME3 stuff, why did you file this at all?” answers).
  Planner has a patch awaiting review/commit.

Killing deprecated GTK+/Glib symbols

• gnome-games currently looks worst. It depends on the release of a new ggz tarball now that ggz patches have landed.
• metacity seems to be in need of more love – patches welcome which might be partially shared with mutter.
• gedit is a bit reluctant to get in the patches too early because it would change UI behaviour. Understandable.

Killing libglade

The aim for August 24 is to have less than 10 modules still depending on libglade. Currently we still have 16 modules left (only very few of them blocked by the gnome-druid migration that has to happen first). If you want to help you should provide a patch. Here’s a how-to.

Killing libgnome and libgnomeui

Apart from the bindings there are not many applications left (yelp, gnome-control-center and gok got ported in the last days), but we all know that the last steps are always the hardest ones, right?

• libgnome:
  evolution, tomboy, gconf (just removing an unused file).
• libgnomeui:
  evolution, evolution-exchange, gnome-panel, gnome-shell.

A gnome-shell release

A fresh and cool tarball is now available.

Killing libgnomecanvas

Evolution heavily depends on libgnomecanvas. It is highly unlikely that this code will be rewritten for GNOME 3 so libgnomecanvas can either be kept deprecated but shipped in GNOME 3, or Evolution copies the code to its internal codebase. Note though that libgnomecanvas itself heavily depends on libart_lgpl which is also deprecated.

GSeal

A rather unknown variable in the current equation as GTK+ does not have everything in place yet, hence it is currently still a moving target. See the wiki for more information and how to compile your module with the GSEAL macro. Maintainers are highly encouraged to try.
In general curious about the GTK+ status with regard to version 3. Hope to see an update about this next week.

Personal opinions on interesting modules

Modules that interest me and that could be interesting for GNOME 3 or later in alphabetic order and without any claim for completeness are:
dconf, gnome-do, gnome-global-menu, gnome-packagekit, gnome-scan, gnome-shell, tracker, vala, zeitgeist.
Just wanted to write this down somewhere as I tend to empty my brain on a weekly basis.

This is another (shortened) update about cleaning up the GNOME stack for GNOME 3. This has also been posted to the desktop-devel mailing list.

This status report refers to the aims listed in the 2.27/2.29 schedule and the automatic statistics available.

PROBLEMS

• We have gconf-dbus in the Mobile set, but it looks dead, plus gconf itself has much better stats. So is this officially dead?
• Still need a solution for deprecations in bindings (fredp?)
• LibEggSMClient vs Session management in GTK+
• Pending GTK+ sealings
• Creation of thumbnails, as libgnomeui is deprecated (cf. this bug)

STATUS OF TASKS

Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0

Willie just updated the wiki page.

Less than 9 modules depending on libgnome

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 15->9).

• low: 7 ((gnome-python-desktop), yelp, gconf, (glade3), gconf-dbus, (gnome-python), (gnome-sharp))
• average: 2 (Evolution, gok)
• complex: 0
• PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: yelp

Less than 9 modules depending on libgnomeui

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 12->10).

• low: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution-exchange, (gnome-python-desktop), libgail-gnome which is required by Orca, yelp, (glade3), (gnome-python))
• average: 2 (gnome-panel, gok)
• complex: 1 (Evolution)

Less than 20 modules depending on libglade

COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 32->19).

• low: 12
• average: 5 (gnome-control-center, dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok)
• complex: 1 (Evolution)
• PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: gnome-media, gnome-panel, sound-juicer

Less than 5 modules with non-low Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 9->6).

• low: 6
• average: 5 (Evolution, gedit, metacity, gconf-dbus, (pygtk))
• complex: 1 (gnome-games)
• PATCHES awaiting review by maintainers: metacity

Less than 15 modules total with Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.3: 17->12).
See above.

HOW TO HELP

For example you should help kill libgnome(ui) by providing a patch. It’s quite often only a few lines.
If you’ve already patched a module to get rid of stuff like gnome-ui-init, gnome-icon-entry, gnome-app, gnome-program, gnome-client, gnome-macros or gnome-druid see the wiki for a list of other apps still using these.

The ever-active Javier Jardón initiated an IRC Bugsquad meeting on

For those that did not attend the GNOME 3.0 Live Circus^WStatus Update at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: As written in the slides (probably not that helpful if you did not attend the talk) I’ve set up a wikipage which

• provides links to all the resources you need in order to help
• lists todo items for getting rid of libgnome(ui) sorted by functionality (header includes) instead of modules.

The latter should be useful for contributors that are willing to help by fixing one specific libgnome(ui) functionality – learn once, fix several modules. Partial patches for the listed bug reports are welcome!

And for more ways to help see Fred’s automatic stats. As always.
Happy hacking!