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.
How about merging gnome-screenshot with Istanbul to create a single desktop grabbing/recording application? Most of the features (area / single window / whole desktop selection) should be the same anyway.
In regarding of gnome-utils, does it required that the maintainer of gnome-screenshot skillful in coding? And is there any reason behind why should we rewrite gnome-system-log or ditch it from gnome-utils? (no flame here, but my philosophy is a small tool that does the job well)
@Patrys: my experience with istanbul and gtk-record-mydesktp and any other video screen capturing application is that it seems that the result varies a lot from distribution to distribution, and from machine to machine. for instance, istanbul works fine on my laptop even when recording GL applications, while it doesn’t work at all for some of my collegues with different video cards. so no: gnome-screenshot should stay as it and only grab screenshots until we find a base working code.
@Jones: well, coding is required to fix bugs. skill can be acquired. as for the rewrite: gnome-system-log is an unmaintainable mess. there is a port to GIO to drop the gnome-vfs dependency but the code is awful. it’s like gnome-dictionary before I rewrote it from scratch: a relic of the 1.x days.
> I plan to release the Vala bindings really soon now
Yay!
> just some finishing touches to make the API nicer to use
Would be nice to fix the build system of clutter-vala a bit as well. I tried to fix a few things yesterday but I gave up after I totally failed to make it regenerate the vapi files. ‘make maintainer-clean’ didn’t help either. You can have a look at gupnp-vala to get some quick help.
@zeenix: clutter-vala works like vala — you just need to remove the *.stamp files. but you’re right: clutter and cogl vapi are not generated anymore, so the stamp files should go away. I’m in the process of fixing that.