Random stuff

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.

finished my exams at the end of last week. Hopefully I should have more time to work on the packages I maintain. close to getting a new release of libglade ready. It is mostly a bug fix release. hopefully I should be able to get gnome-vnc and gnorpm up to scratch. Gnorpm has heaps of bug reports open, but the majority are for about three packages. It would be nice if the web bug submission form got people to look at the current bugs for a package. If their bug is covered, then they could add information. This would save me having to merge the reports. Of course, I will have to fix those bugs :)