Yearly Archives: 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 🙂

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).

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.

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.

• Working on gnorpm again. I am converting the rpmfind
  code over to a non blocking architecture using the glibwww
  code I wrote (a thin wrapper around the W3C’s libwww that
  uses the glib mainloop for transfers). It is not currently
  finished, but it is getting there.

• Apparently the gtkhtml guys are using glibwww as well.
  Maybe it would be a good idea to split the code into a
  separate package at some point. For now, it means there are
  other people to help find and fix bugs in the code
  🙂 Libwww is a bit of a beast if you try to do
  something non trivial in a way that the authors did not
  expect. I know all libraries are like this, but libwww
  seems to be more so.

• Once I have these changes finished, I should install
  that copy of Red Hat 6.1 to see what the problems were with
  it. Probably merge in some of the Red Hat patches in the
  RH6.1 RPM of gnorpm and release 0.11 (if I call it 0.10,
  there will be people calling it 0.1, which is quite old
  now).

• I should do some more hacking on dia. I am looking at
  adding a python scripting interface. With a few
  modifications, it should be possible to add extra menu items
  that trigger python functions. Alexander has made Dia nice
  and modular, so this should be pretty easy. This interface
  should be powerful enough to do full manipulation of
  diagrams, and also extract information from a diagram for
  writing export filters. I want to be able to use the
  interface to export UML diagrams to UXF format and circuit
  diagrams to SPICE net files for instance. One thing that
  will be needed is a general way of reading and modifying the
  properties on objects. There was some talk on the list of
  adding this, which will be good.