GNOME Commit-Digest

This week… 1590 commits, in 166 projects, by 183 happy hackers (and 153 were translation commits).

• Many modules saw development releases for 2.25.1.
• The libgnome dependency got removed from gnome-power-manager, and gnome-utils (dictionary, screenshot, logview) removed it as well as the dependency on libgnomeui.
• In the same vain, seahorse-plugins removed its gnome-vfs dependency.
• William Jon McCann commited a new volume control using PulseAudio, deprecating the old gst-mixer one.
• Behdad Esfahbod worked quite a bit on gnome-settings-daemon and blogged about the improved login time he achieved.
• Benjamin Berg added a Clearlookstest theme, as he proposed on desktop-devel-list several weeks ago, it is not enabled by default though.
• Seed, GObject-Javascript bridge, was finally revealed by Robert Carr on gtk-devel-list.
• brasero got a nautilus extension, based on current nautilus-cd-burner.
• John Carr commited support for git mirrors to jhbuild (support for bzr mirrors coming soon).

I asked Robert Carr some questions about Seed, and its relation to GJS, as they both bridges gobject and javascript, using the mighty gobject-introspection infrastructure; he confirmed he had been in contact with the GJS developers and pointed out some differences:

[Seed is different than GJS] Notably how we handle inheritance (GJS doesn’t). Also “out” arguments from functions we set properties on objects passed in, while GJS returns arrays. Then there are also some other differences with exceptions, signals and a few various things. In addition Seed does some stuff GJS doesn’t (uses libffi to box JavaScript functions into C function pointers, for functions like pango_fontset_foreach), and I’m sure GJS does some stuff that Seed doesn’t.

So compatibility would be an awkward issue at this point in time, so it seems to me like it’s best for both projects to continue development at this point, and once things are more fleshed out, it might become clear what approaches make more sense.

We’ve definitely talked about implementing a common embedding API though, and maybe after one more release it would be good to look at compatibility more.

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