Nokia making it complicated

Posted on 2009-07-22 by aklapper

As Maemo 5 (Fremantle) gets closer I’m worried about

And the code of some modules in SVN is totally outdated though the recent code is available anyway in the Fremantle SDK releases.
Pushing this to SVN should take less than hour but some managers obviously don’t recognize that there are developers out there interested in the platform. Which is a pity.

Posted in computer, lang-en, maemo | 3 Comments

GNOME 3 Cleanup: How you can help

Posted on 2009-07-14 by aklapper

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!

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | 1 Comment

We’ve come a long way.

Posted on 2009-07-13 by aklapper

Exactly ten years ago we bought a modem as my sister had convinced my parents to not wait until my birthday in October (yes, I’ve never used anything like BBS and mailboxes). So I was able to send my first email to a friend from my parents’ place on July 12th, 1999 using Mozilla 4.6 on Windows98. Later on I switched to “The Bat!”, and Evolution 1.0.3 in May 2002.

Friends of mine had gotten internet a bit earlier and it was interesting to see the new opportunitities offered by it, e.g. chatting or access to information. We were also able to use internet at school – three Windows 98 computers (with 166-233MHz if I remember correctly) were available.
alt-232, btk3003, t69m & me founded Shutdown Crew – another anniversary to celebrate. From nowadays’ point of view I’d call our activities scriptkiddieing but still I pretend that it was about experimentally using available technology at that time (while having lots of fun). ;-)

For a few months I even had a dial-up flatrate at home (until that company went bankrupt). So Napster was running only at night and my parents could use their phoneline at day. The first usage of IRC probably took place here too.
After moving from my parents’ place to a town with a university I still used to have a modem dial-up connection for years until our neighbour offered us to share his broadband wifi. After that you won’t go back.
When I started bugwork on Evolution in Ximian Bugzilla my IRC usage was totally different to nowadays – guenther described it with “Got in, asked three questions to Gerardo Marin (the Evolution bugmaster) and immediately went offline again”.
Later on my workflow was to have a table and a textfile with bug numbers and required actions that I took with me to the university where I spend time on IRC and downloaded the latest testing rpm files to install on my home computer (I finally bought my first laptop *years* after that). I could not reproduce bugs directly at the university as their GNOME/Linux installation was ancient.

It’s only a few years ago but now all this somehow sounds strange to me – internet has become way more ubiquitious.
Same when I think about mobile phones and the society.

  • Fifteen years ago a phone number belonged to a place. Now it belongs to a person.
  • There were always a few friends that expected me to answer their calls to my mobile phone at any time because “that is the reason why people have a mobile phone”. Nope. Still me deciding.
  • From my experience more people are late to appointments because they now have the option to send a short message five minutes before. “Hi, won’t make it in time. Will be late”.
  • Young people plan less when and where to meet in the evening – you can spontaneously call somebody, ask where s/he is and if it’s good around there.

All in all it’s been an interesting ride and I’m looking forward to the next ten years of communication somewhere between good old email, SMS, IRC, IM (ICQ, MSN, Google Talk), Facebook, Twitter/Qaiku and blog comments plus a good indexing service that makes finding sent & received information easier with all those different communication channels around that I sometimes use…

Posted in computer, lang-en, misc, non-technical | 3 Comments

Google Summer of Code problems, GCDS

Posted on 2009-07-06 by aklapper

GSoC and GNOME

Today David J.Daniel G. Siegel and me gave a talk at GCDS named “Google Summer of Code & Highly Open Participation Contest: How successful is GNOME?”.
The slides are available here (PDF, 5.2MB).

The discussion after our talk basically boiled down to two issues:

  • How to keep more of the students in our community after GSoC
  • How to integrate more of the code that was written for GSoC

Some of the feedback I got after the talk and at the Nokia party in the evening:

  • Tobi said that more feedback on the weekly GSoC reports written by the students could be helpful to strengthen the feeling that there is interest in their work.
  • In case that the GSoC mentor is not also the module maintainer Cosimo proposed that an OK by the affected module maintainer should be required first to make sure that the GSoC code will be welcome (sometimes maintainers have other ideas and concepts about architecture or the path their project should take).
  • GSoC code is not integrated into the next GNOME version because of the GNOME release schedule. Hence it takes at least 9 months until the results are included in a stable release.
    There’s no solution to this as both Google and GNOME do not intend to change their schedules.
  • Diego said that there should also be an email to the corresponding project mailinglist/maintainer and/or a blog post by the mentor of the student that introduces the student.
  • Björn said that integrating people into our community might be improved by also using social networks like Facebook.

General GCDS comments

  • It’s hot and sweaty and I got a slight sunburn. Expected though. I’m good in getting them.
  • Makes me very happy to meet with so many friends, colleagues and people again for talking about code, projects, real life. Grateful to be part of this great open source community (which means GNOME, KDE and freedesktop.org here).
  • The venue has a terrace right to the sea – the smell is beautiful and yesterday we went swimming in the Atlantic ocean around midnight. Priceless.
  • Maemo Harmattan switching from GTK+ to Qt by default. After talking to several people I am not yet sure what to think about it.
  • Richard Stallman’s keynote. I must admit that I am biased as I don’t share his point of view on C# and parts of his ideology. So to me this was somewhere between a leader talking to his sect and a children’s birthday (I missed playing “Hit the Pot” after singing the Free Software song together). Potentially misogynistic “jokes” (Lefty described it quite well) made it even worse. In doubt I hope that it was not his intention. I was a bit reminded of Michael Jackson – awesome artist and great work in the past but let’s forget about the last years please.
  • GNOME 3 status talk tomorrow trying to cover most of the recent activities and plans. Let’s get the big picture to see where we are.

Microblogging

Henri tricked me at the GCDS Welcoming Party into promising him that I am going to start using Qaiku as I am the only person left using the maemo.org wiki for his activity reports. I still don’t feel comfortable with microblogging. I have a Twitter account (just needed it for reproducing some bugs on the N810) but I do not use it at all (and never intended) as the signal vs. noise ratio seems way too high (also see Stormy’s post about that and other issues with microblogging). I admit that it can be useful though. Time will tell.

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | 5 Comments

Musik.

Posted on 2009-06-22 by aklapper

Gerade rotierend:

Und am Mittwoch abend dann live:

Freu.

Posted in lang-de, music, non-technical | 2 Comments

GNOME 3 status.

Posted on 2009-06-20 by aklapper

This is an 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 (which now also covers the Mobile section, hence results can be worse than last time).

Maintainers: I have listed available PATCHES AWAITING REVIEW.
Please take a look if your module is listed and review/commit NOW so the changes can receive enough testing for 2.28.

THE PROBLEMS: What migration paths are missing?

This list is of course not complete. Also see LibgnomeMustDie.
Feel encouraged to add your issues.

ZERO modules with Glib-Deprecated-Symbols

NOT COMPLETED (“Reopened”) now that we also check external deps and the Mobile set:

  • Still to do: gconf-dbus, evolution-data-server-dbus.
  • External deps to do: dbus-glib, hal, libnotify, mono. PATCHES available: dbus-glib, libnotify. FIXED: farsight2, libnice, poppler.

Officially ANNOUNCE libglade as deprecated in favor of GtkBuilder

DONE.

Less than 35 modules depending on libglade.

COMPLETED.

  • low: 25
  • average: 5 (dasher, gnome-media, gnome-panel, gok, zenity)
  • complex: 2 (gnome-control-center, evolution)
  • PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gdm, gnome-nettool, gnome-mag, gnome-media, gnome-menus, gnome-panel, gnome-session, gnome-system-tools, gtkhtml, sound-juicer, zenity, tracker. Maintainers please review/commit.

Clear a11y plan and schedule for 3.0

NOT COMPLETED.

Less than 12 modules depending on libgnome

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 22->15).

  • low: 10
  • average: 4 (Evolution, gnome-media, yelp, anjuta)
  • complex: 1 (gok)

Please share experiences and knowledge.

Less than 12 modules depending on libgnomeui

NOT COMPLETED (Progress compared to 2.27.1: 15->12).

  • low: 9
  • average: 2 (Evolution-Exchange, gnome-panel)
  • complex: 1 (Evolution)

Please share experiences and knowledge.

ZERO modules dependening on gnome-vfs

NOT COMPLETED (Reopened):

  • average: 1 (gst-plugins-base)

Gtk-Deprecated-Symbols

  • low: 8
  • average: 7 (gnome-control-center, evolution, gedit, metacity, glade3, gconf-dbus)
  • complex: 2 (gnome-games, gnome-media)
  • PATCHES awaiting review/commit: gnome-control-center, gedit, metacity, yelp, glade3, policykit-gnome

Evolution-Data-Server must be migrated to D-Bus by default

NOT COMPLETED. Evolution schedule currently under discussion.
A Git branch is available.

WebKit status report for 2.27.5

IN PROGRESS. WebKitGTK+ has been proposed as an external dependency.
See d-d-l for the status.

Evolution to get rid of Bonobo by 2.27.3

NOT COMPLETED and postponed for 2.29.1.
See KillBonobo for the status. Testing and reporting bugs is HIGHLY welcome. See Matthew’s blog for more information.

Complete migration from HAL to DeviceKit-* by 2.27.3

NOT COMPLETED.
According to “jhbuild rdepends hal –direct” the following modules still depend on HAL:

More important stuff to take a look at:

Not yet covered in the stats but required to fix are also:

Nice to fix:

GNOME Showstoppers

For GNOME 2.26/2.28, I have posted a Showstopper Review earlier this week. Feel free to take a look, test & help out, get things done.

Other activity

Kudos to the progress that has been made so far!
Getting rid of Popt is basically DONE.
ZERO modules dependening on Esound is DONE.
ZERO modules dependening on Gnomeprint is DONE.
The Website revamp front is rocking, and the Documentation team also has some great momentum currently.

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | 9 Comments

Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend

Posted on 2009-06-07 by aklapper


Haven’t seen much blogging about the Mozilla/Maemo Danish Weekend yet – here we go.

After meeting at the airport with Lauri Võsandi (who works on Bittorrent support in Canola as part of Google’s Summer of Code) and quickly getting a shower in the hotel, we went to the café of the IT University (the host of this event). Nice to see some familiar faces again plus those that you have only seen pictures of before. That evening I mostly had discussions about technology and politics (hey, there were also “real” Danish students around and not only Mozilla or Maemo hackers – there seems to be a life out there!).

Saturday was opened by Mozilla’s William and Nokia’s Quim in the one lecture room that we had. Many people though also spent their time in the large hall room (lovely architecture!) for sitting, hacking and discussing together. There were talks about Fennec (Mozilla’s browser for smaller devices), Canola, Fremantle Stars and Mer.
Coffee, tea, great sandwiches for lunch and sweets for the afternoon were provided (though the coffee was removed one hour before lunch – this decreased productivity for many people). ;-)
In the evening after picking up some All you can eat we met in a bar in the center to have some beers.

On Sunday we had about 25 quick lightning talks, sometimes just a few words explaining “I work on/I can help you with…” but very helpful. It was also a pleasure to talk to some Mozilla folks that were curious about how it is to deal with a big company that (slowly) moves to Open Source.
All in all, a very good and helpful weekend.

Work related on that weekend I introduced an “upstream” keyword in maemo.org Bugzilla (had that in mind for some time now), discussed the clutter blocker with Niels and Soumya, fixed some database sanity check issues, triaged lots of bugs, and started to concentrate more in triaging bugs & feature requests for Fremantle. So if you are subscribed/have voted for requests that interest you you might have received some “Fixed in Fremantle” bugmail but especially for feature requests I have often set the Version field to Fremantle which basically means “This is not fixed yet”.
Still thinking about how to deal with bug reports about API documentation (which is directly handled by the corresponding package developers and not by the Documentation folks) – I more and more tend to add a “docs” keyword and to keep those bugs in the corresponding (code) product instead of moving them to the “Developer Platform > Documentation” product so they remain visible for the developers. Comments?

Looking forward to the soon-to-come maemo.org Brainstorm for feature requests that deal with a broader scope.

Posted in computer, lang-en, maemo | 2 Comments

GNOME 3.0 Schedule draft; Streamlining of the Platform.

Posted on 2009-04-02 by aklapper

GNOME 3

Today I have released a GNOME release schedule proposal for 2.27 and 2.29 (please keep discussion streamlined on desktop-devel mailing list instead of e.g. the comments section of this blog).
GNOME 2.30 will be GNOME 3.0 (if it’s considered to be ready in an early 2.29 stage – else 2.32 will become 3.0), as proposed by the GNOME release team at GUADEC 2008 (Remember some blog entries and press coverage?).
All the additional stuff (“additional” compared to former schedules) listed in the proposal is technical and under the hood, as this schedule proposal also covers streamlining of the platform by getting rid of deprecated modules.
Note that such a “boring” platform cleanup is not meant to completely define GNOME 3. This schedule proposal is just a proposal for being a part of what will be called GNOME 3.
By purpose, the schedule proposal does not cover any potential UI changes, any potential redefinition of GNOME, any blingbling UI, any complete rewrites from scratch or any implementations of a semi-working kitchen sink. If you are interested in such fields and topics, I am not the person to talk to. Please see other more generic threads about GNOME 3, especially Vincent’s d-d-l posting and blog post and Lucas’ blog post.
Also, this plan does not cover by purpose stuff like gnome-shell vs. gnome-panel, gnome-zeitgeist, or Vala, PolicyKit, PackageKit, etc. Discussing them is recommended, but IMO these modules are not crucial for the GNOME3 schedule.
On the other hand, gconf vs dconf is also not yet covered by this plan, but definitely crucial to discuss.

So… if you are also interested in cleaning up your favourite desktop and getting it to the next level: Join the discussion (e.g. about the future of GNOME’s a11y), or take a look at the status overview and provide patches in GNOME Bugzilla. Help is highly welcome, especially when it comes to getting rid of libgnome and libgnomeui. Code needs to be written here. Soon.

GNOME 2.26

I didn’t blog about our beautiful 2.26.0 release as I’ve been busy with relocating and job, but I must mention my heros for 2.25 – those brave folks that provided a lot of patches to clean up and helped on the way to GNOME 3. This is definitely not a complete list, but names like Thomas Andersen, Cosimo Cecchi, Luis Menina, Maxim Ermilov and Saleem Abdulrasool come to my mind. Thanks guys, you rock!

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | 10 Comments

Checking and updating old Maemo bug reports

Posted on 2009-03-27 by aklapper

How up to date are the bug reports?

There’s currently only 5 open non-moreinfo Apps/Platform tickets left with version field set to a version earlier than 4.0.
That’s quite cool because it means that there’s nearly no non-updated bugs left about Bora or earlier – stuff that’s not being worked on anymore anyway. Having an up-to-date bug database is important to see what issues are still relevant, so help is welcome to check whether tickets filed against Chinook still apply to the latest Diablo version (5.2008.43-7) by simply adding a comment and updating the version field.
But even more helpful is to check if tickets still apply to Fremantle. This can be done for some Platform issues by using the Fremantle SDK alpha.
There’s currently 38 open Platform tickets with the version field set to Fremantle, but this also means that there’s 267 open Platform tickets with version field not set to Fremantle.
The maemo.org Bugsquad is waiting for you – even if it’s only one small bug that you check, it definitely helps improving the platform and is appreciated! :)

Fremantle SDK alpha

Very late to blog about this, but some people might have seen that I’ve created a few more Target Milestones (5.0-alpha, 5.0pre-alpha) instead of the generic “Fremantle” one when the Alpha SDK was released. This should make everything a bit more transparent by having exacter information on when a bug was exactly fixed.

Posted in computer, lang-en, maemo | 4 Comments

GNOME bugs: Bits and pieces.

Posted on 2009-02-22 by aklapper

More news to come in the next weeks, e.g. a schedule for 2.27.

Posted in computer, gnome, lang-en | Comments Off on GNOME bugs: Bits and pieces.