June Hymn

today is the deadline for submitting candidacies for the election of the GNOME Board of Directors.

I decided to run again this year: it took me a bit to get into the role, but I think I can work with the fellow Board members, as well with the rest of the people in GNOME, to ensure the proper functioning of the Foundation now.

remember: being on the Board of Directors doesn’t mean having a fancy title, or a shot at managing the GNOME project towards a technical goal; it mostly entails providing the means by which the +GNOME project can actually function. without the Board and the Foundation, we could not organize hackfests, or send people to GUADEC, or even have GUADEC.

being a Director is not a huge amount of work: a 1hr meeting every two weeks, and at most one hour every day for emails and IRC discussions; but it’s necessary work, and it makes all the difference between a functioning community that can provide infrastructure to a complex project and a project that can only use public and free services without any guarantee of continuity. imagine not relying on all the services on gnome.org; or imagine not having any funds to organize the successful hackfests we’ve had in the past few years.

if you are a GNOME foundation member, consider running – if not for a specific goal, just to help out making GNOME successful in bringing together people to provide a first class software platform.

Culling of the Fold

I’ve received a bunch of questions about the state of the perl-Clutter bindings in the past couple of years; I entertained a vain hope of returning to actively maintaining them, but the effort of actually maintaining the underlying C library left little to no time for bindings (just ask the pyclutter users).

luckily, the stellar work done by Torsten Schönfeld on Glib::Object::Introspection allowed me to jump start an introspection-based binding module for Clutter in about half an hour – including the time spent porting one of the examples in the C API reference to Perl.

perl-Clutter is in git.gnome.org, and it works pretty much like perl-Gtk3 — same Dist::Zilla based setup, same dependencies.

contributions are very much welcome — though I’ll try to reserve some spare time for going back to the same levels of compatibility as the old, static bindings. one area for new contributors is pure-Perl overrides to paper over the C API; another is writing Cogl bindings, possibly static ones like perl-Cairo, as the Cogl API is not very introspection-friendly.