Issue 23

March 15, 2009

This week… 2312 commits, in 240 projects, by 194 happy hackers (and 1253 were translation commits).

    Hard code freeze started this week, things settle down and translators are hard at task, there is now 8 languages at 100% and 44 languages over the 80% mark. The Oriya team is again leading the progress show with a mind-boggling increase of 17 points (that is almost 7500 strings!), it is now at 77%; other particulary noteworthy teams are Malayalam (+11 points), Hindi (+10), Telugu and Tamil (+8), Greek and Assamese (+7).

  • A major discussion happened in gtk-devel-list over fsync in glib/gio, led by Alexander Larsson with a patch to gio making sure fsync() is called and adding a new G_FILE_CREATE_ASYNC_WRITE flag. A patch to call fsync() was also applied to gedit.
  • Epiphany trunk is again preparing a WebKit future with profile migration from the old Mozilla backends (both SQLite and txt formats).
  • To perfectly match nautilus-cd-burner, Brasero added a CD/DVD Creator entry to the System Tools menu, to start up a Nautilus window in burn:// (GNOME bug 573790)
  • Dan Winship seriously improved libsoup documentation.
  • Rhythmbox got a new CD burning plugin, using brasero, that is now built in preference to the nautilus-cd-burner plugin. (GNOME bug 536732)
  • Andrea Cimitan updated his Murrine theme to support the “progress bar in entry” that is new in GTK+ 2.16.
  • Ray Strode disabled the user presence stuff from gdm for now until some of the pieces that make it useful get fleshed out.
  • Finally Vincent Untz spent much time to fix session saving for 2.26, be sure to test the patch now attached to GNOME bug 552387.

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Issue 22

March 8, 2009

This week… 2186 commits, in 244 projects, by 204 happy hackers (and 804 were translation commits).

  • Translators are again working hard; Brazilian Portuguese reached 100%, and there are four languages already at 99.9%. Italian jumped from 95.2% to 99.2% thanks in part to Milo Casagrande getting granted a subversion account (welcome!). Estonian and Tamil both reached the 80% mark, there is now 41 languages over it. Noteworthy is also the Oriya team, that increased its score by six points (that’s more than 2500 strings translated in a single week), now at 59.9%.
  • Metacity title bars will now include “(as username)” for windows running as another user; this was discussed in a squib of the day (GNOME bug 549389).
  • Alexander Larsson fixed many issues in gvfs and gio.
  • Empathy logging support got more robust with the merge of Jonny Lamb log-manager branch. (GNOME bug 538293, GNOME bug 549284)
  • A new card set, created by Frederik Elwert and using the Tango style, has been added (in gnome-games-extra-data).
  • Epiphany and WebKit/GTK+ are again very active, with for example the addition of basic download support. (GNOME bug 570735)
  • In GTK+ the drawing of progress in entries was improved, notably so that the progress is drawn behind icons.
  • Brian Cameron added a Sound Theme tab to the old gst-mixer, for people that can’t use PulseAudio; he also applied a few lying patches.
  • moserial, a clean serial terminal, got imported in GNOME subversion repository.

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Issue 21

March 1, 2009

This week… 1904 commits, in 187 projects, by 204 happy hackers (and 641 were translation commits).

  • British English is the first language to reach 100%, there is now eight languages with over 99% of the UI strings translated, sixteen with over 95%, and 39 over the 80% mark (used to be listed in the release notes).
  • There are three new modules in Subversion this week: Gnome Format, a GNOME media formatter, developed by Michael Kanis, gpointing-device-settings, a program for touchpad and trackpad settings, developed by Hiroyuki Ikezoe, and gio-strigi, a GIO wrapper for Strigi, developed by Philip Van Hoof.
  • Davyd Madeley started preparing the stage for the 2.26 release notes.
  • Following on last week work, Alexander Larsson worked on trusted desktop file launchers in Nautilus.
  • Rhythmbox got a D-Bus interface for adding and removing DAAP shares. (GNOME bug 570115)
  • GParted added detection of the BRTFS file system.
  • David Zeuthen added a –device option to gvfs-mount.
  • Support for taking a screenshot of an user-defined selection landed in gnome-screenshot. (GNOME bug 155061, opened in October 2004)
  • Lucas Rocha merged his session-saving branch into gnome-session trunk.
  • Epiphany (webkit) started using SoupProxyResolverGNOME, so it gets support for GNOME proxy settings through libproxy.
  • Bastien Nocera announced the fork of bluez-gnome that is now available in gnome-bluetooth.
  • Orca got support for notify-osd (the new Ubuntu notification daemon).

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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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Issue 16

January 25, 2009

This week… 1650 commits, in 173 projects, by 193 happy hackers (and 306 were translation commits).

  • The panel got lockdown support to prevent it being dragged to a different screen edge. (GNOME bug 309721).
  • Alacarte was ported to gio. (GNOME bug 514574)
  • Jonh Wendell rewrote the vinagre applet, to use GObject, fixing the way it works on transparent panels in the process (GNOME bug 568674); he also commited a rewritten Vino Preferences dialog, with the ability to check if the machine can be accessed though the Internet.
  • Seed got opengl-glib girs and a glxgears port.
  • In Nautilus, gnome-desktop and gnome-settings-daemon, patches from Ray Strode landed, adding support for fading between backgrounds.
  • Anjuta got upgraded to use GtkPrint, removing its dependency on libgnomeprint/ui. (GNOME bug 564659)
  • Patches by Tomeu Vizoso were commited to evince to move code to a libeviview library, so it can be embedded in other applications, Tomeu blogged about it. (GNOME bug 567751)
  • John Stowers came back on conduit, applying patches and fixing many bugs.
  • In Epiphany Gustavo Noronha added multiple keyword-based AND-search for the location bar.
  • GTK+ got support for select-by-word in selectable labels, marks on GtkScale, and improved autocompletion in the file chooser entry.

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Issue 15

January 18, 2009

This week… 1452 commits, in 161 projects, by 186 happy hackers (and 261 were translation commits).

  • A Brasero plugin has been added to Totem, to allow creating VCDs from playing video files, and duplicate VCDs and DVDs (GNOME bug 565383).
  • Hand-written gir files (GL, cairo, fontconfig, freetype, libxml2, xfixes, xft and xlib) were moved from gir-repository into gobject-introspection; so upstream libraries depending on these can avoid a gir-repository dependency.
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo turned the already awesome epiphany location bar into the woohoo bar (enhancing the completion popup by showing a two line cell containing the favicon, the title of the page and the URL). (GNOME bug 541782)
  • gnome-session got a D-Bus Presence API, and the user switch applet got updated to use it.
  • There were lots of updates to brasero to address issues raised during discussion on desktop-devel-list.
  • gnome-network-preferences has been renamed to gnome-network-properties
  • Evolution added the possibility to import PST files (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders). (GNOME bug 208426)
  • GTK+ got a new API to change global input method. (GNOME bug 450716)
  • Bastien Nocera replaced some custom code in gnome-user-share, and a direct Avahi dependency, by using the mod_dnssd Apache module. (GNOME bug 567442).
  • Finally, Meld and the trash applet both removed their libgnome dependency.

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Issue 14

January 11, 2009

This week… 1992 commits, in 182 projects, by 186 happy hackers (and 349 were translation commits).

  • Lucas Rocha set his eyes on gnome-session, and started fixing bugs introduced in the 2.24 rewrite.
  • A library, libbrasero-media, got extracted out of brasero, Philippe Rouquier tells more about it on desktop-devel-list.
  • Lightsoff, which was started as an example shipped in the Seed module, has been imported in gnome-games.
  • File Roller and Eye of GNOME removed their dependencies and libgnome and libgnomeui; and Anjuta removed its dependency on gnomevfs.
  • GVFS got its SMB browsing authentication support much improved (GNOME bug 524485).
  • Cosimo Cecchi added sound events support in Empathy (via libcanberra).
  • In gnome-keyring-daemon, the new modular SSH agent has been integrated as the main SSH agent.
  • Ignacio Casal Quinteiro added a new fullscreen mode to gedit, with a sliding toolbar. (GNOME bug 520749)
  • A new plugin was added to nautilus-sendto, to send files over IM via Empathy.

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