Issue 30

May 3, 2009

This week… 2031 commits, in 193 projects, by 245 happy hackers (and 290 were translation commits).

  • The App monitoring module landed in gnome-shell, it will be used to provide things like “Recent Apps”. (GNOME bug 570899).
  • The Evolution external editor plugin has been updated to behave like the kmail equivalent, the normal evolution mail composer is now displayed, and the external editor starts whenever the user types something in the body. (GNOME bug 567145)
  • Jody Goldberg improved Gnumeric xlsx format parsing, adding basic support for external references.
  • Yelp can now display simple text files. (GNOME bug 565502)
  • Passepartout, the revived desktop publishing application, got its internationalisation support completed, making all the diealogs properly translatable.
  • Tomboy printing support was rewritten to 1) wrap very long lines and 2) partially render paragraphs at the end of pages.
  • Empathy gained a menu entry to display its file transfer manager. (GNOME bug 574626)
  • Rhythmbox got support to read cover art embedded in media files (for local files only). (GNOME bug 345975)
  • The GNOME sound recorder saw its libgnome/libgnomeui dependency removed. (GNOME bug 567310)
  • Davyd Madeley rebased David Zeuthen resolution independance private git-svn branch against the real GTK+ repository, and published it into a new “resolution-independence” branch.
  • Finally, deprecated GTK+ symbols were removed from a bunch of modules: vino, gnome-system-tools, gok and gnome-media/grecord.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 29

April 26, 2009

This week… 2205 commits, in 220 projects, by 230 happy hackers (and 267 were translation commits).

  • Still in the aftermath of the Git migration, 189 commits were about DOAP files and JHBuild got his Git support quite improved.
  • Empathy now displays the transfer speed in its file transfer dialog. (GNOME bug 580097)
  • Meld has added support for SVK. (GNOME bug 416418)
  • Epiphany was fixed to use GNOME settings for the default font sizes, instead of the WebKitGTK+ defaults.
  • The libgnomeui dependency was removed from both the GStreamer Properties and the Media Profiles in gnome-media.
  • Peter Bloomfield ported the Balsa mail client to use GMime 2.4.
  • In evolution-data-server, Rob Branford ported libedata and libebook to D-Bus in the D-Bus branch, and Philip Withnall converted the Google calendar backend to use the external libgdata in the libgdata-port branch.
  • David Zeuthen commited his GDBus work in a new gdbus branch of glib; and Dan Winship merged his GResolver (a glib-ish interface to DNS) branch into glib (and blogged about it). (GNOME bug 548466)
  • Nautilus now use g_timeout_add_seconds instead of g_timeout_add where appropriate (GNOME bug 574033); also Deprecated GTK+ symbols were removed. (GNOME bug 565038)
  • Shaun McCance pushed his Mallard branch to the gnome-doc-utils repository.
  • GNote, the Tomboy Gtkmm clone, got support for Add-ins. (GNOME bug 578980)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 28

April 19, 2009

This week… 1889 commits, in 207 projects, by 235 happy hackers (and 407 were translation commits).

  • The Git migration happened, and 84 commits were about doap files, and 44 about .gitignore files.
  • gnome-netstatus, empathy and gnome-dictionary (from gnome-utils, GNOME bug 577943) all switched to GtkBuilder.
  • libgdata added support for ETags, to allow for versioning when querying, updating and deleting entries. (GNOME bug 578661)
  • A new plugin has been added to eog, to order images randomly in slideshow mode. (GNOME bug 562135)
  • Libchamplain got support for more advanced markers, allowing to set many properties on markers, allowing features such as attached image or text and how if should be displayed (wrapped, ellipsized, etc.). (GNOME bug 576055)
  • Matthew Barnes updated gnome-video-arcade to make game play back work again with recent MAME releases.
  • Sabayon was updated to use Xephyr instead of Xnest.
  • Xan Lopez fixed backwards search in Epiphany Find Toolbar.
  • Empathy got a new “join chatroom” dialog, which will only load the room list when the rooms are displayed.
  • Seed imports system was changed to match the one in gjs, making it easier to port applications between them. Robert Carr posted details in some Seed updated.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 27

April 12, 2009

This week… 1245 commits, in 160 projects, by 183 happy hackers (and 277 were translation commits).

  • The 3.0 platform cleaning plan was announced and already beared a lot of results : baobab, hamster-applet, gcalctool and glchess got ported to GtkBuilder; brasero, the toolbar editor in libegg and yelp got rid of their glib and GTK+ deprecated symbols; gnome-mag migrated to gio/gvfs; and eog incorporated all it needef rom libart_lgpl, thus removing its dependency (GNOME bug 577940, GNOME bug 578219, GNOME bug 571868, GNOME bug 578304, GNOME bug 517732, GNOME bug 573023, GNOME bug 556808 and GNOME bug 556807, at least).
  • Also Matthew Barnes killed the deprecated html-editor component from gtkhtml2, getting rid of bonobo (GNOME bug 571743).
  • Several gnome-games (aisleriot, gnibbles, mahjongg, and iagno) were updated to use g_timeout_add_seconds where sensible. (GNOME bug 564202).
  • Vincent Untz improved his gnome-session patch, and commited the fix so that reboot and shutdown also leave the session properly, by letting apps exist before doing the real reboot/shutdown.
  • The GVFS FTP backend saw several fixes (including GNOME bug 520399, GNOME bug 573349).
  • Ignacio Casal Quinteiro added source code completion to GtkSourceView.
  • pygtk was changed to use numpy instead of Numeric, that was no longer maintained (GNOME bug 387544).
  • Empathy added a new presence selector widget, that incorporates a text field for quick setting of custom messages (GNOME bug 569449).

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 26

April 5, 2009

This week… 1520 commits, in 164 projects, by 160 happy hackers (and 180 were translation commits).

  • GTK+ and glib switched to git.gnome.org; so Alexander Larsson sent in his client-side-windows branch; in the meantime Dan Winship published a glib branch adding GResolver, a glib-ish interface to DNS.
  • Gerd Kohlberger migrated gok to libcanberra; it was the last module using esound.
  • Anjuta git plugin got checkout support; and the project import wizard has been replaced by a simpler dialog that allows to import directly from a version control system.
  • A patch by Simon van der Linden got commited to gnome-terminal, adding a “Leave Fullscreen” menu item (GNOME bug 566335).
  • Totem switched from bacon-message-connection to libunique (GNOME bug 162822), also a new D-Bus Service plugin (GNOME bug 576016) and the YouTube plugin was ported to C, using the new libgdata library.
  • Matthew Barnes continues his hard work removing bonobo usage from evolution, he finished attachment dragndrop in the composer window.
  • Evince fading animations got fixed (the next page was displayed before animation started).
  • Empathy was fixed so IRC commands without special support are no longer sent as plaintext. (GNOME bug 577026).
  • Rhythmbox improved his support for MTP devices; it now creates album objects on the device when transferring songs, and sends the album art to the device if it supports the JPEG file type.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »