25 December 1999

I made another release of Dia. This
one should fix the bugs people reported just after the 0.82
release. You can now copy/paste image and bezier objects
without dia crashing. I also added a new export dialog
modeled after gimp’s save dialog. This also allows me to
separate off export filters to plugins, which is good.

I have included a partially complete CGM filter with the
new release. It does everything except beziers at the
moment. There is a polybezier element in CGM v3, but I have
not had much luck finding docs for it. I don’t even know if
it is meant to be a closed, filled region or just a
line.

Some more work on gnorpm. It almost compiles again. I
just need to finish off converting the web find window to
the new API and then I can start testing it. After that I
should see what changes are necessary to get it compiling
with RH6.1 and make sure it doesn’t crash in that setup.
Then I can go and start cleaning out all the bug reports.
Is there any record for the largest number of merged bug
reports closed in one go? It certainly feels like I shoulf
be in the running 🙂

15 December 1999

I made my first release of dia as its new maintainer. It
mostly seemed to go well. There are a few bugs that showed
up after the release, so I will have to fix those. I guess
we can get back to breaking things to add new features.

Did not end up going diving on monday night, since it
felt like more work getting everything ready than we wanted
to do.

I commited the new GnomePaperSelector widget and
GnomeUnitSpinner widget to gnome-libs HEAD branch. As well
as looking nicer, it should be easier to use for people
using something other than points as the paper units.

Doing a bit more work on the glibwww based rpmfind code
in gnorpm. I think I am getting close to having the find
directory compiling correctly. Then I will have to check if
all my logic is correct and convert the rest of gnorpm
(which would be easier).

9 December 1999

I got my uni results yesterday. I got good marks in both
my computing and pure maths majors. I got invitation for
honours year letters from both the maths and computer
science departments. I will have to decide where I want to
do honours. Apparently I got the highest score in the
computer networks unit, which means I will be getting a
prize from a company called AlphaWest.

I converted the page setup widget I wrote for dia to use
GnomePaper and GnomeUnit. After doing a bit more cleanup,
and implementing the old GnomePaperSelector interface, I
will commit it to gnome-libs HEAD branch.

Dia now has a bezier connection line. It is a mixture of
work by Lars Clausen and me. It works fairly well. There
is a patch for it from Lars to better handle the initial
drag when placing the object, but I haven’t got round to
applying it. Cyrille has a few patches to start doing the
properties interface. I haven’t read them yet, and I think
I will wait till 0.82 is out before applying them
anyway.

I should really do a bit more work on gnome-python and
gnorpm. I should probably spend a while bringing
gnome-python back up to scratch and release a new version.
As for gnorpm, I have got a bit stuck implementing the
dependencies code in terms of glibwww. It is quite
difficult handling the state between callbacks.

1 December 1999

Alexander Larsson handed over the job of maintainer of
dia to me. He has done a great job so far, but did not have
enough time to put into maintaining it. I have a few ideas
for new features I want to work on. These include the
scripting interface, object properties and printing
changes.

If anyone wants to help out with dia, join the dia
mailing list.