James Henstridge

GNOME

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.

Bugzilla

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.

Been playing with XSLT a bit recently. It is quite a
nice transformation language. I have been porting the gtk-doc
DocBook -> HTML conversion program to use xsltproc (with
a customisation layer over Norman Walsh’s XSL stylesheets),
rather than Jade (with a customisation layer over his DSSSL
stylesheets). Took a little while to learn what I needed,
but the end result looked fairly elegant.

While working on the customisation layer, I even found a
simple bug
in the base stylesheets.

EggMenu

The menu merge code is mostly working now. With some
help from Anders, almost all the menu merge functionality is
working. You can merge and demerge UI files, bind a
particular menu item to a different action, and use
placeholders.

Toolbars are still left to go. I need to work out how to
do the placeholders on toolbars, as the placeholder
implementation for menus makes use of (possibly hidden)
separator menu items before and after the elements within
the placeholder. The separators in GtkToolbar are not
widgets, so I will need to work out some other way to handle it.

linux.conf.au

Preparation for the conference is going well. We are
still waiting for more submissions for the Call for Papers.
If you want to do a talk, please send in a submission!

Went to see AOTC today. It was a lot better than Episode
1. It was pretty cool recognising some of the buildings I
had been to in Seville in some of the scenes.

It was a bit weird that all the clones were kiwis though.

Switched over to GNOME 2.0 on my laptop. It is
definitely at the stage where I can use it for every day
work. There are a few annoyances, but it is shaping up
quite nicely. Libglade is shaping up very nicely, and will
probably be go stable soon. PyGTK might take a little longer.

I recently found out that bugzilla.gnome.org has
support for new email tech, but it was turned off by
default. I turned it on, and the bug mail looks a lot nicer
(like my mail from all the other bugzillas, rather than diff
-u output).

Menu Code

I moved all my action based menu prototype code into libegg,
which is becomming the prototype library hp
proposed a while back. andersca might
check in some of his new icon list widget soon, which will
be good. GTK+ 2.4 should be very good (the 2.2 feature list
has already been finalised; it is basically 2.0 plus the
multihead patches, and should be available in a month or two).

My menu code should eventually provide menu merge
capabilities similar to the UI handler code in libbonoboui,
but not depending on any of the corba stuff. It should be
extensible enough so that it can be used by things like
bonobo. The aim being to allow gtk+ and gnome/bonobo
programs to use exactly the same menu code (rather than
having to rewrite portions of an app in order to port it to
GNOME).

linux.conf.au

Hopefully the Call for Papers should be released in a day
or two. Just a few last details to finalise. Note that the
conference website is at conf.linux.org.au at the
moment, due to the transient nature of .conf.au
domains. I hope to see everyone in Perth next January!

PyGTK

The Python bindings for GTK+ 2.0 are going pretty well.
The defs files are pretty much up to date with the 2.0 API,
so I have a fair idea of what needs to be done. After
finishing up a few of the remaining architectural issues, it
would be good to put out a 2.0 release. Not everything
needs to be wrapped, but I should reduce the number of
unwrapped functions.

Updated my Mailman
patch to use some of the newer features in SpamAssassin 2.20.
This includes showing which rules got triggered for
messages that get held (this is the feature that required
the 2.20), and the ability to give messages from list
members a bonus when calculating the message score (so that
they are less likely to get held/discarded). The newer
version is in Mailman’s patch tracker:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103

With this patch and SA 2.20, I seem to be getting about
80% less messages to moderate, which is much more
manageable. Adjusting the thresholds a little would
probably improve matters further.

jdub put the original version of my
patch on mail.gnome.org
(with a discard threshold of 20 — mainly to test its
ability to identify spam). It manages to get rid of the
worst of the spam delivered to GNOME lists though.

With this patch, you could almost open a list up to non
subscriber posting again, like most list admins did before
the spam epidemic grew to its current proportions. The SA
mailman filter doesn’t catch everything though, so list
members would have to be slightly tolerant of spam to allow
non subscriber posting again.