Issue 35

June 7, 2009

This week… 1950 commits, in 167 projects, by 242 happy hackers (and 218 were translation commits).

  • Banshee gained a “shuffle by album” option (GNOME bug 348582)
  • Epiphany support for Python extensions has been removed, the supported language for extensions other than C/C++ is now JavaScript through Seed.
  • Support for publishing geolocation information has been merged into Empathy (GNOME bug 571666)
  • Milan Crha added a folder emblem to show new mail arrivals to Evolution (GNOME bug 323037); also Evolution dropped support for CDE (GNOME bug 582939).
  • Support for the JPEG 2000 image format has been added to Gimp (GNOME bug 111409)
  • GTK+ gained a new GtkInfoBar widget, similar to GeditMessageArea and similar widgets in Firefox. Its API is inspired by GtkDialog, with a content area and an action area. The message area uses symbolic colors for different background colors for warnings, errors, informational messages, etc. (GNOME bug 555344)
  • Rhythmbox track change notification bubbles gained a “Skip” button (GNOME bug 331272)
  • Shaun McCance created a new “mallard” branch for Yelp, to add support for the new Mallard document format.
  • Christian Persch made a few HIG improvements to the NetworkManager connection editor (GNOME bug 584223)
  • JHBuild GUI was rewritten to be totally awesome (and to not require libglade).
  • PyBank, the bindings for GIRepository, got handling of structs as return values.
  • Most importantly, Anjuta splash screen got rewritten from the obsolete libgnomecanvas to straight cairo (GNOME bug 571740).

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Issue 34

May 31, 2009

This week… 1881 commits, in 190 projects, by 250 happy hackers (and 279 were translation commits).

  • DBus support has been added to gjs. (GNOME bug 580948).
  • gnome-power-manager went back to use the original idletime code to fix backlight bugs, Richard Hughes explained in his commit that “The new IDLETIME code from gnome-session is very buggy, and the old code was much easier to understand. This should fix random DPMS off blanking and the fade-up-down-up on session resume.”
  • In Empathy Pierre-Luc Beaudouin added support to display the locations of contacts on a map widget (provided by libchamplain). (GNOME bug 571667)
  • Vinagre gained a new “read-only” toggle button in its toolbar. (GNOME bug 583230)
  • Johannes Schmid removed the remaining libglade bits from anjuta, that is now using GtkBuilder. (GNOME bug 530740)
  • gdl, the GNOME Docking Library, removed its dependency on libgnome (GNOME bug 580860) and dropped libglade in favour of GtkBuilder (GNOME bug 582511).
  • xchat-gnome got rid of the deprecated GTK+ symbols it was using (GNOME bug 572239).
  • More than five years after it was first reported, thanks to the migration to WebKit, Epiphany will now set the Referer header when opening links in new tabs. (GNOME bug 120341)

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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)

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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.

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Issue 24

March 22, 2009

This week… 2594 commits, in 269 projects, by 223 happy hackers (and 993 were translation commits).

  • 2.26 got released on Wednesday, and translators worked hard, a special mention for the Maithili and Assamese teams, that improved their percentages by near 20 points.
  • An initial backend support for GDB Variable Objects landed in Nemiver.
  • Philippe Rouquier started splitting brasero between backend and application.
  • The Mini-Commander applet got support for https URL. (GNOME bug 575782)
  • Cosimo Cecchi fixed nautilus to spawn its windows on the correct screen, instead of always using the default one. (GNOME bug 555078)
  • Epiphany got support for translucent link-message statusbar, ‘Inspired’ from Chrome, will show the link-message in a translucent floating div on the bottom left corner of the web view if the normal statusbar is hidden.
  • Cody Russel improved the GTK+ menu theming on Win32, using the new menu styling API, it makes GTK+ looks much better on Windows Vista. (GNOME bug 538840)
  • Rhythmbox will now use the new GtkEntry API for the “clear” icon in its search entry, rather than libsexy’s SexyIconEntry; also GnomeHRef usage has been replaced with GtkLinkButton, that removes the libgnome dependency.
  • Also the Rhythmbox Jamendo XML parser got rewritten to create database entries in a single pass, rather than creating an intermediate structure and converting that to database entries. This speeds up catalogue loading and reduces memory consumption. (GNOME bug 424423)
  • Rygel got transcoding support, from any format (that GStreamer can handle) to
    mp3, LPCM and mpeg transport stream.
  • In the Murrine GTK+ engine Andrea Cimitan removed shadows from comboboxentry’s button and welcomes any feedback on this.
  • Finally two new modules in Subversion this week: Jordi Mas imported Mistelixa, a DVD authoring tool, and Krzesimir Nowak imported libvtemm, C++ bindings to libvte.

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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 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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