There And Back Again

Again at home, after a week in Berlin.

The city is wonderful – now I understand why Marta loves it that much: the place is gorgeous, the people is warm and they really make you feel at home. Me and Marta were both a bit sad to leave – but we plan to return there as soon as possible, maybe even in summer, even though with the GUADEC 2006 moved at the end of June we’d already have our summer holidays covered. Time will tell.

We’ve done a ton of photos – but the last day’s worth of them (mostly about and from the dome on top of the Reichstag/Bundestag) were eaten by F-Spot; it was an older version of it, and I did the stupidest thing by deleting them from my card too, but F-Spot shouldn’t lie about having done the import and then really having finished just the thumbnailing.

While in Berlin we’ve met for a couple of hours Torsten Schoenfeld, another gtk2-perl hacker – well, he is the gtk2-perl Release Master and the Test Suite God, other than being more than Just Another Perl Hacker; he is a real pleasure to talk with and a great guy. If you ever come to Italy, you’re up for a beer, or more than one. ;-)

Now that the winter holidays are really over, let’s get back to work.

The gnome-utils release went fine (even though there’s a typo in the NEWS file I’ve submitted – dang!), and a bunch of bugs have been filed in Bugzilla. Keep them flowing, so I can know what doesn’t work. I’m off to add the window-size-saved-across-session feature that was added to the search tool, and to make the icon in the applet become a toggle button, instead of a plain icon.

Another project I’m working on is the build environment for the Glib Perl module and Glib-based Perl extensions; I began looking at Module::Build while in Berlin, but in the end, I came up with another solution – which will be easier to port to Module::Build later on, when that module enters the standard Perl base distribution. Anyway, I’ll talk about this issue later in a (lengthy) post, so stay tuned.

There are a bunch of fixes due for the libegg/recentchooser code, the main one being the sorting functions duplicated from the RecentManager object into the RecentChooser object; in the end, I’d like to remove all the sorting/filtering stuff from the RecentManager, and let all the UI built upon the RecentChooser interface provide their own sorting/filtering stuff. This would make the RecentManager object a thin layer upon the BookmarkFile object, and would really make things easier to be included into the GTK library. In the end, all the sorting a filtering is something that has to do with the display of the data that the RecentManager holds, so they do not belong into the manager itself. Other than this fix, I’ll begin working on a patch for the BookmarkFile object in order for it to land inside Glib, and a patch for the FileSystem object to use it for its bookmarks.