Issue 43

August 2, 2009

This week… 2195 commits, in 186 projects, by 288 happy hackers (and 328 were translation commits).

  • Now that gnome-doc-utils and yelp both have support for Mallard documents, Milo Casagrande converted gnome-hello documentation to the new format.
  • After some discussion on the gnomecc list the default toolbar style has been changed to “Text beside items”.
  • Sabayon was changed to use Xephyr instead of Xnest, as Xephyr supports the “new” X extensions.
  • gnome-session has been fixed to not exit when the system bus restarts. (GNOME bug 583345)
  • A new “ssh” plugin appeared in vinagre, which is becoming a universal tool to access remote systems.
  • Robin Stocker added to Totem the functionality to remember the current position of a stream when pausing or closing. (GNOME bug 164918)
  • After Hylke Bons posted some thoughts on the font viewer Thomas Wood started implementing the proposed ideas, in the “font-viewer-revamp” branch of the GNOME Control Center.
  • Anjuta Git plugin gained an option to initialize new repositories. (GNOME bug 566698)
  • Finally, during this 10th week of the summer of code, students were hard at work, some noticeable advancements:
    • Paul A. Bellamy successfully implemented syncing and a properties dialog for MTP devices in Rhythmbox;
    • Neil Loknath added streaming to Banshee using Telepathy, you can now stream a contact’s music after downloading their library info;
    • Paulo Cabido merged the plugin engine with Getting Things Gnome main development branch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 38

June 28, 2009

This week… 1811 commits, in 183 projects, by 217 happy hackers (and 226 were translation commits).

  • Evince was changed to output straight PDF for printers supporting PDF natively. (GNOME bug 585442)
  • Evolution gained an inline view of application/mbox attachments. (GNOME bug 464131)
  • A problem with RSA key size that were not a multiple of 8 has been fixed in gnome-keyring. (GNOME bug 576700)
  • A new theme, Moblesse, has been added to the experimental GTK+ CSS theme engine.
  • Milan Crha fixed several issues and improved the performance of the evolution-data-server CalDAV backend.
  • Philippe Rouquier commited a new layout for the Brasero user interface: the medium selector is still inside the main window and on clicking burn a dialog appears to set the session burning options
  • In both libgoffice and gnumeric Andreas J. Guelzow improved Open Document Format support (number style output, scientific number output, time and date styles, import of currency symbols, and much more).
  • F-Spot Adjust Time dialog, and gnome-session windows, have been ported from libglade to GtkBuilder.
  • A Python binding for libbrasero-burn has been added to gnome-python-desktop.
  • As explained in his Data about Data weblog post, Alexander Larsson added metadata support in gvfs, and already made Nautilus use it.
  • Empathy has been updated to use gnome-session instead of gnome-screensaver to know when the session is idle.
  • Benjamin Otte did some research on the GTK+ file chooser performance
    (explained in a tale of waiting message in the
    gtk-devel-list, be sure to also read the followup messages), and pushed a new “filesystemmodel” branch to publicize his work.

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 25

March 29, 2009

This week… 1396 commits, in 196 projects, by 161 happy hackers (and 354 were translation commits).

  • Vincent Untz commited his changes to session management (GNOME bug 552387).
  • gnome-disk-utility has been ported to the new DeviceKit-disks, that uses libatasmart.
  • Rhythmbox switched to using GStreamer decodebin2 instead of decodebin, that fixed playback of chained ogg streams.
  • Brasero split into backend (libbrasero-burn) and application was finished, the new library API now needs to be refined.
  • gpointing-device-settings got support for tap move and palm detection.
  • Sebastian Dröge started porting totem GStreamer backend to playbin2. (GNOME bug 542663)
  • gnome-bluetooth device chooser saw some merging of device types into categories (mice and keyboard in “input devices”, headphones, headsets and others in “audio devices”…), making easier to find a select devices.
  • libchamplain added a way to make visible a bunch of markers (GNOME bug 574809) and smooth movement to a new position (GNOME bug 557641).
  • Anjal saw many changes, such as working Delete/Junk, a formatting toolbar, and the possibility to open mails in new tabs.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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).

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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 »