Guilherme de S. Pastore

And so on Monday I mailed devel-announce-list after someone requested a CVS account to work on a certain module and I could not find out who the maintainer of the module was because it did not have a MAINTAINERS file.

The result we have got so far is pretty motivating: 20 new or updated MAINTAINERS files so far. Thanks to all those who took prompt action after the announcement, you rock! However, allow me to remind everyone that there are over 800 modules hosted on cvs.gnome.org, of which approximately 600 did not have a MAINTAINERS file at all. There is still a looooong road ahead of us; for the good of our users and the mental sanity of our beloved sysadmins, let’s please get moving with this!

With so many obligations, so many fun things I would like to do and so many important things I would like to help with, I seemed to forget I am the only one committing translations for the Brazilian Portuguese team, even though there is a number of people with accounts granted precisely for that. My apologies to the few dedicated translators for leaving your precious translations in our request tracker for so long, I will try to catch up and clear the backlog still today.

Perhaps it is time to disable inactive CVS accounts too… I will get around to drafting some policy on this as soon as I can clear the translations backlog.

This is already the second attempt to get something serious regarding GNOME moving in Brazil. The first time, it seems, the people involved were more interested in bringing famous people in (no matter if they used KDE) and leaving GNOME people out. This led to some interference attempt from the GNOME Foundation, which made some people unhappy for obscure reasons and messed it all up.

Lucas and I have been trying to figure out what happened in the last attempt (so as to not make the same mistakes) and get things moving around here, since little time before Fórum GNOME. The Fórum was, of course, the perfect endless source of stories about the miserable failure, which were really helpful. But someone needs to make something besides listening to sad stories…

After stealing the GNOME-FR layout and fighting against it for some time, Lucas has finally managed to import the basic structure of what we intend to be br.gnome.org into CVS. It is now time to fill it with nice content and then publish it! Yes, it is being worked on. Hopefully, this nice website, combined with our list on gnome.org will be a large first step of many, that will lead us in the right direction.

Wish us luck!

And finally, after tons of hard work by elijah and our rockingly mad bkor, GNOME now has the most beautiful and useful bugzilla ever, and working on bugs is definetely a lot more pleasant now, which is unarguably good. Words cannot describe the huge improvements, check them out!

Hug your inner bkor today, and remember to not let the real one pay for drinks at GUADEC.

Oh well, I think I have been delaying my posts to this blog too much recently. First my motivation-related post, which got deleted and then re-added, now this one about conferences: I intended to write about Fórum GNOME as soon as I got home, but that was not possible, and I took much longer than I expected to put some time into writing about it.

As I had foreseen, it has been an indescribably great opportunity to get to know some people. I will not mention any of them, though, because they were many and I would really rather not forget anyone. It was wonderful to meet you all! Of course, besides the fun, it has been perfect for having some important discussions and spreading the word of our beloved GNOME (not that this is not fun, anyway).

Lucas gave a very good talk on GNOME in general, briefly explaining what it is, summarizing the history and showing some of the amazing improvements that are coming with 2.14. The next day, we gave a mini-course on GNOME translation: one person out of 10 knew what GNOME was (perhaps strong indication that we are failing in doing our part to reach 10×10?). Even with this initial disadvantage, though, we managed to make those who attended finish up the translation of GNOME 2.12, and one of them (curiously enough, not the one who initially knew what GNOME was) has been working hard on the translation of 2.14! I can surely say it was worth it.

After a city tour in Curitiba together with some nice people and a round of sadness and farewell, I was coming back home. Not long after I arrived I was already packing up again, though: the day after I got home, I was heading to Florianópolis for SOLISC. As maddog usually says, we have lots of conferences in Brazil – perhaps too many. 😉

But I cannot say it has not been great. Izabel was going to give a talk whose title was GNOME, but was more like “contributing to GNOME”. She had not gotten prepared, so I helped her during the presentation, and later gave a talk on GNOME programming. It was not planned, so I had to prepare the talk while I was there, which I would also publish, if OpenOffice had not eaten them for breakfast. I was quite a useful round of evangelizing.

Now I just have to find some more conferences to attend… FISL, perhaps?

School holidays are near… 8 tests from now and I’ll have most of my time free to do whatever I want for 2 months. But what is free time useful for if you don’t have something to do with it? Well, actually, I have.

I had been quite demotivated to even stand in front of my computer recently, mainly because of some totally unexplainable delays in some overbureaucratic processes inside the project I had been devoting most of my time to until now, Debian, which are probably due to some kind of prejudice or prejudgement (age?) by some specific individuals.

Not too long ago, after living that feeling of frustration for 3 years, I decided I should do something else for the desktop environment I liked so much (GNOME), more than the little translation work I had been doing until then. To my pleasant surprise, the GNOME Project received me and my tiny contributions with arms wide open and is now, for me, a great mixture of a project I love, a family, and probably more.

That has boosted my motivation to levels I hadn’t seen in a long time… I think I had even forgotten how good it feels, and I owe this to you guys, thanks!

As for my plans from now on, I intend to keep expanding my contributions, just like I’ve been doing in the past few months, although in a rather faster pace, but also intend to use some time to study and learn, something I haven’t dedicated myself to for some time either. I want to
hack on some cooler and more complex stuff, and I’ll have to concentrate on acquiring knowledge if I want to achieve that.

Finally, as “Yet Another Motivation Boost” ™, we’re going to have the second Fórum GNOME – for which some great graphics have been put on gnome.org thanks to Andreas Nilsson – in 11 days from now. If I manage to attend, which I hope I will, it will be a great opportunity to meet good friends again and to get know some nice people, which is
a great way to feel more involved, which is, in turn, a great source of motivation! See you guys there, hopefully! =)