28 June 2002
The 2.0 release has come and gone. It managed to take down widget (which serves www.gnome.org, news.gnome.org and bugzilla.gnome.org). Not being able to access my bugs was a bit of a pain.
The new release looks very nice, and GTK 2.0 is a joy to program. I still need to finish off PyGTK 2.0 though. The articles from Dennis E. Powell and Nick Petreley about GNOME 2.0 have been very surprising. DEP’s article was very encouraging and Nick’s one almost promoted GNOME 🙂.
LibEgg
I haven’t done much work on the menu merge code, but have set up gtk-doc to build reference documentation. I configured it to use the new XML support (so gtk-doc generates XML, and xsltproc is used to transform to HTML). Seems to work very nicely.
I also had a small play with conversion to PDF with the xmlto script, which uses the PassiveTeX FO processor. There were only a few minor issues making the conversion difficult. The first was that xmlto wasn’t performing XInclude processing. This was fairly easy to fix (I sent a suggestion to the author to turn this xsltproc option on).
The more serious one was that passivetex didn’t seem to support prortional table column widths, which are used in the gtk-doc output. This shouldn’t be too big a deal, as I could correct this with a stylesheet customisation layer. Lastly, the <synopsis> elements were not being rendered correctly, but I think this was an issue with the (old) version of the XSL stylesheets I was using.
I did a mockup of a “show/hide advanced options” button for the query form in bugzilla (see the second attachment). It is just some simple javascript that uses a cookie to persist its state. In the simple mode, it just shows the summary search field and the product/component/version/milestone lists. While the new query page layout is a lot better, I know a number of people who are simply put off by the number of available query options (even though they only need use the first few in the new layout). By allowing people to hide the majority of the options, hopefully this complaint will go away.