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 32

May 17, 2009

This week… 1925 commits, in 174 projects, by 218 happy hackers (and 183 were translation commits).

  • libgnomekbd and gnome-power-manager have been converted from libglade to GTKBuilder.
  • Vino got ported from libdbus to dbus-glib, as a first step towards integration with the Telepathy framework. (GNOME bug 580464)
  • In GTK+ the GtkLabel gained the possibility to show hyperlinks, that feature was previously provided SexyUrlLabel. (GNOME bug 508810)
  • Also in GTK+ a printing backend using PAPI, as found on OpenSolaris, has been added (to both master and 2.16) (GNOME bug 382676)
  • Support for annotations landed in Evince, it requires libpoppler 0.11 (GNOME bug 315002)
  • Empathy added a fullscreen mode for video playback. (GNOME bug 580771)
  • Behdad Esfahbod merged his harfbuzz-ng branch into Pango.
  • The Volume Control has been updated to show high-level channel mapping string for each devices, this gives pretty names such as “Surround 7.1” or “Stereo” (GNOME bug 581921).
  • After a discussion on desktop-devel-list Robert Carr created a new gnome-js-common module, to share code and tests between Seed and GJS.
  • In Seed a new module to bind Cairo has been developed.
  • Alexander Larsson imported gnio (socket and networking support) into glib.
  • Much work happened (and is still ongoing) in Orca to refactor the speech and braille generators. (GNOME bug 570658)

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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.

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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 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 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 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 13

January 4, 2009

This week… 1171 commits, in 146 projects, by 141 happy hackers (and 236 were translation commits).

  • gedit got an internal message bus to let its plugins communicate.
  • Epiphany updated from its own EphySearchEntry and EphyIconEntry to GtkEntry, it also uses the new “progress in entry” support to draw progress in the location bar.
  • gconftool got a new –toggle option, to toggle a boolean key.
  • gossip removed libgnomeui and libgnomevfs, and started to use libcanberra-gtk for sound support.
  • Jonathan Matthew added some basic window management effects to gnome-shell. (GNOME bug 563844)
  • A new version of l10n.gnome.org (damned-lies) went live, merging in the Vertimus translation tool that was already used by some teams. (announce).
  • A low diskspace checker has been added to the housekeeping plugin of gnome-settings-daemon. (GNOME bug 557647)
  • gnome-build that was a standalone module but only used by anjuta has been merged in anjuta.
  • GtkEntry Caps Lock warning mode switched to using an icon.
  • seed got a 0.3 (and 0.3.1) release and Robert Carr sent a summary of what happened since 0.1.

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