Issue 20

February 22, 2009

This week… 2257 commits, in 200 projects, by 207 happy hackers (and 665 were translation commits).

  • Again the translation teams do great in the commits top 10, taking five places; the teams are Basque, Swedish, Romanian, Danish and Finnish (Iñaki Larrañaga Murgoitio, Daniel Nylander, Jani Monoses and Ilkka Tuohela).
  • gtk-doc got the possibility to link to struct members. (GNOME bug 565126)
  • The deskbar-applet bookmark search will also look at epiphany topics. (GNOME bug 572291)
  • In glib Alexander Larsson modified g_content_type_guess to never sniff desktop files when the filename is known. In other words, only allow desktop files with the .desktop extension and when the filename isn’t known. This is a security precaution since desktop files can execute arbitrary code when launched and we don’t want to allow them to try and hide as another type. There is no legit reason to not have the .desktop extension anyway. (the .desktop issue is also being discussed in desktop-devel-list)
  • Tracker got support for IPTC metadata in jpeg and tiff files.
  • Sven Neumann gave some love to the GTK+ directfb support, applying some patches, fixing some issues.
  • Epiphany has a new option to open new windows in tabs (only available as a gconf key for now). (GNOME bug 571593)
  • Christian Persch killed the custom OBox widget from gnome-panel as GtkBox now supports changing the orientation.
  • The balance bar in the new volume control will now instant-apply. (GNOME bug 566423)
  • Metacity got totally rid of metacity-dialog, and will now use zenity to present dialogs. (GNOME bug 521914)
  • Vinagre got updated to allow IPv6 address on the command line and in the connection dialog.
  • Rygel is getting ready for a new release, several changes here, notably the response for seekable media request is now sent buffer by buffer so the whole file is not put into memory.
  • And finally, a pythonconsole plugin, based on the gedit plugin, landed in eog.

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Issue 19

February 15, 2009

This week… 1783 commits, in 177 projects, by 180 happy hackers (and 753 were translation commits).

  • GNOME is now approaching 2.26 fast, and translators started, or doubled, their efforts to get it available in their languages, Daniel Nylander, Jorge Gonzalez Gonzalez, Gil Forcada Codinachs, Gabor Keleman, Jani Monoses, Alexander Alexandrov Shopov, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (and others) all commited many updates from their teams (Swedish (at 99%), Spanish (at 99%), Catalan (at 97%), Hungarian (at 99%), Romanian (at 71%), Bulgarian (at 91%), Chinese (Taiwan and Hong Kong, at 93%) and Thai (at 84%)).
  • The new volume control switched from D-Bus to libunique to insure it has a single instance running. Anjuta did the same, removing old crufty bacon-message code.
  • Rygel now has a gio-based/like asynchronous plugin API. That and
    proper use of Tracker’s APIs makes browsing of media very much faster than before; there was also lots of refactoring, clean-up and
    bugfixes. (thanks Zeeshan for the report)
  • evolution-webcal has removed its lignomeui dependency.
  • Support for incoming room invitation has been merged in Empathy. (GNOME bug 525559).
  • The visual bell settings that were previously in the sound preferences have been moved into the accessibility tab of the keyboard preferences.
  • Metacity will now use libcanberra to play system bell and workspace switch sounds; and sound-juicer will use it to play a sound when the rip is complete (GNOME bug 469258).
  • Also in Metacity, Windows demanding attention should never appear in the alt-tab list unless they’re of a type which might have appeared there anyway.
  • Brasero won’t allow Joliet (so called “Windows compatibility”) when there are symlinks in the tree as Joliet doesn’t support them.

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Issue 18

February 8, 2009

This week… 1751 commits, in 173 projects, by 183 happy hackers (and 462 were translation commits).

  • Glade added “commit” signal to allow custom editors to do command group/macros serialized around property changes; this will be used by Anjuta.
  • A “Removable Devices” plugin landed in nautilus-sendo (GNOME bug 453758)
  • Almost three years after 0.6.1, libcroco 0.6.2 has been tagged and released, incorporating many patches.
  • Epiphany (2.26 branch) got updated for yet another Mozilla API change (for Gecko 1.9.1 support).
  • In Pango Behdad Esfahbod again saved over 100 alloc calls when loading DejaVu Sans.
  • A new metacity branch (rpnparser) was created to host a possible RPN-based parser which is (slightly) faster and (hopefully) clearer than the existing one.
  • Empathy got a rewritten voice/video call support, using farsight2 instead of stream-engine.
  • Tomboy has been ported to GtkPrint, gnome-games is now the last module to use the deprecated libgnomeprint/ui library.
  • Seahorse has been updated to it only autostarts the daemon when sharing is enabled.
  • And Colin Walters merged the “statusmenu” branch into gnome-shell.

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Issue 17

February 1, 2009

This week… 1687 commits, in 167 projects, by 184 happy hackers (and 391 were translation commits).

  • In Conduit, John Stowers added a new dataprovider that changes the desktop wallpaper, and suggests connecting to a flickr RSS feed…
  • Sound Juicer media support has been ported from libnautilusburn to libbrasero-media. (GNOME bug 567286)
  • After much testing Behdad Esfahbod removed the ClassDef->Defined field in Pango, and the associated special-handling code; he wrote “The special-casing was consuming lots of memory. EIGHT MEGABYTES for loading DejaVu Sans! While this could be complete fixed, I decided to remove the special-handling code altogether. I don’t think it will make any real difference, and if it does, we’ll fix fonts.”; in another commit he also saved over 2000 alloc calls when loading DejaVu Sans.
  • Deskbar got an OpenSearch module. (GNOME bug 528184)
  • Cosimo Cecchi implemented write support for the ObexFTP gvfs backend. (GNOME bug 519071)
  • Following libnotify acceptance as an external dependency, Empathy got support and will now show a popup notification when receiving a new message.
  • Ryan Lortie added _async functions for GDataInputStream (async versions of read_line and read_until). (GNOME bug 568575)
  • file-roller got ported to use gtkbuilder instead of libglade.
  • A good bunch of memory leaks were fixed in brasero.
  • The Volume Control balance widget got updated to use the new GTK+ scale marks.
  • Banshee got a basic clutter UI for rendering the video texture from the clutter sink in the media pipeline.
  • Theppitak Karoonboonyanan went on building modules out of their source trees and filed bugs and patches against those failing, many of those issues are already fixed (in gnome-settings-daemon, Ekiga, Brasero and gnome-keyring).
  • Callum McKenzie finally killed the last bit of libgnome in gnome-applets; and returned the mixer applet.
  • Long standing GTK+ bug (lastly spotted in a post on Planet Gnome by Ruben Vermeersch) got nailed with a patch from Simos Xenitellis. (GNOME bug 162726)
  • Rhythmbox improved its handling of transcoding format selection for MTP devices, now preferring MP3 over M4A/AAC. (GNOME bug 567524)
  • Pavel Kostyuchenko work on Anjuta/Glade3 integration (part of GSoC, see project his proposal) finally got commited. (GNOME bug 542412)

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