Yorba recently received funding from Adam Dingle toward fixing a smorgasbord of bugs in the GNOME ecosphere — from gedit to Epiphany to Nautilus to GTK, and more. The quantity of tickets (over fifty!) and the breadth of the applications they covered meant we needed to find someone with a particular affinity for the depths of GTK and GObject. Fortunately, we found such a person in Garrett Regier, who’s been doing a smash-up job the past few weeks knocking down these particularly aggravating bugs.
To give a taste of some of the fine work Garrett’s been up to:
- can’t set download folder – What looked to be a bug in Epiphany’s Preferences dialog turned out to expose some issues in GtkFileChooserButton too. That and File chooser seems over-enthusiastic about using subdirectories solve some usability issues with the GTK file chooser interfaces.
- “Location” column would be helpful for search results and Open the directory of a search result/recent file – Both first filed in 2006, Nautilus now lets you know where to find the files you searched for and can open those folders in a new window.
- A number of gedit plugin bugs and tweaks, including a slew of them in the File Browser (a plugin I basically live inside all day when I’m coding): display icons beside every file, Alt+Home should jump to home directory, allow me to type a folder path directly, and should display files in same order as Nautilus.
As you can see, most of these so far are annoyances, but long-standing annoyances that can make the user feel there’s something not quite right. Some were down-right maddening. Consider the over-enthusiastic file chooser bug. As time went on, its reporter “trained” himself to work around it.
Garrett is still at work on Adam’s list and so more fixes should be dropping soon. In addition, we’ve asked Garrett to start working on larger projects, including a Find in All Files gedit plugin that should be more stable and easier to use than the currently existing alternatives. Stay tuned!
Really nice to hear ! Is it possible to set up a common fund for such tasks ? I would definitely love to donate to GNOME devs willing to do some bugfixing… I donate to GNOME but it’s not used for this purpose.
Cheers !
If there was enough interest and people were willing to commit a sufficient amount of money, then it might be worthwhile to organize such a fund. But I suspect people would want to fund their pet bugs, and it would start to look like a bounty program, which has been less than successful in the past. Dave Neary wrote a great summary of such problems with GIMP: http://dneary.free.fr/gimp_bounties.html
displaying the location for search results in nautilus is super useful and needed, however it seems the bug is only fixed for the list view display, which is not the default one.
i guess in icon view there could be some grouping by folder, but if there are many folders it could be distracting, a simpler way would be that in case there are several matches with the same name the folder name is added in brackets:
name (folder1) / name (folder2)
but yes all of these things are progress, and progress is good 🙂
As a commenter on the ticket pointed out this morning, there are at least two other outstanding Nautilus tickets regarding search results that are relevant: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311875 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=703629 So, there’s more work to do, but at least now there’s _some_ way to see where your search results are located.
Cool!
How long will this Dingle-Regier tour de force continue? Bounties might be bad, but what if we just you guys to keep going until 3.10.1? Please provide an estimate and a way to donate. Thanks for being so f…… Awesome. You just made Nautilus 10% better.
Although we’re not doing bounties, if you’d like to contribute to help defray the cost of Garrett’s work, we would of course appreciate it. Visit our donation page (http://www.yorba.org/about/donate/) to see various ways you can contribute money toward the cause.
Thank you! This is much appreciated…
Good article and good lessons learned, but will you try again now that we’re all a little more educated on the need?