guadec 2008: I’m late, but I wanted to thank everyone in the GUADEC team for making this edition of the conference really rocking. thanks to everyone.
clutter: well, after the 0.8.0 release during GUADEC things have slowed down — but just a little bit; we’re fixing bugs in trunk and preparing for a 0.8.2 release of Clutter core. we also released the various integration libraries, and I’m trying to find more time to fix up the bindings. at the moment, the only bindings that have been officially released are the Perl bindings, the C++ bindings (thanks to Murray Cumming), the C# bindings (thanks to Thomas Machelen) and the Ruby bindings (thanks to Neil Roberts). I plan to release the Vala bindings really soon now — just some finishing touches to make the API nicer to use.
pyclutter: I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the Python bindings for Clutter have been, let’s say, problematic. taking a week or so away from them seems to have worked well enough, though, and now trunk is in a much better shape. unfortunately that have been some reports of segfaults and weird memory allocation issues — so any help in terms of testing is much, much appreciated. I also finally got around and generated the API reference for pyclutter using a slightly modified script coming from pygobject — but the content is missing sections like the object properties and signals. it just needs editing and some kind Python developer to start contributing documentation and fixes. again: any help is much appreciated.
travel: next week I’m headed to Sunnyvale for work; I’ll be there from the 17th to the 22nd. after I get back I’ll finally get a couple of weeks off, which I’ll spend with my wife travelling between New Haven and New York.
gnome-utils: finally found some time to do bug triaging and applying some old patches. nothing stellar: for what I have in mind I’d need a lot more time, or a lot more contributions (and less drive-by patches). for instance:
- gnome-screenshot needs a maintainer, badly. preferably somebody with a dual screen set-up, that can test the behaviour on multiple screens;
- gnome-system-log either needs a rewrite and a maintainer or needs to be dropped from gnome-utils and moved into its own module and its presence in the desktop suite re-evaluated; as it is, it’s mostly a liability and a relic of the past; if somebody comes up with a maintained replacement, we can talk about integrating that;
- gfloppy needs to go. seriously: it’s useless. I had hopes for gnome-format, but now David Zeuthen is planning for a complete disk manager using the DeviceKit-disks API and PolicyKit so we can either wait for that, or write something really simple using those two APIs.
as you can see, gnome-utils is not at all dead — it just lacks manpower sticking around enough to get a SVN account and an entry in the MAINTAINERS file.