Month: October 2005

EOG 2.13.1 is released! This is the first EOG development release and my first release as a co-maintainer. Tim has been very busy at work and other stuff. So we’ll work together on EOG maintainership. See NEWS to know what’s new. Basically, this a heavy-bug-cleaning release. EOG had lots of crashes that needed to be solved. Cleaning these crashes is the first step of our roadmap for GNOME 2.14.

More love to EOG
Some more bug cleaning. It’s good to see that we came from 108 to 90 bugs. Well, there are lots of bugs to clean but I’m just happy to have some boring/critical bugs solved in EOG.

Movies

• Monsters, Inc. – very funny!
• Out of Time – nice triller!

Movements and communities
I gave a talk about some issues that I see as relevant about free software. One of the key subjects was the important distinction between the free software communities (the several actors directly involved with the free software projects developement) and the free software movements (social actors dedicated to spread the free software philosophy, informing about its social, political and economical relevance, deploying free software in the public sector and social projects and so on). I argue that the communities are not necessarily always involved with political free software activism, the movement. Here in Brazil (and I think in other countries too), this is a very important distinction to be made because it avoids wrong perpeptions like thinking that free software is just a cause of a specific party or something with a homogeneous ideology set, which is not true. Social actors with very diferent ideology sets support free open-source sofware and hackers are quite heterogeneous when we talk about social and political positioning (which is natural people from diferent cultures and social contexts). There are marxists and companies like IBM, Novell, Sun looking at the same “thing” with a great happiness but with very diferent “eyes”.

I haven’t being posting for a long time. So, I’ll talk about some cool things I’ve done and seen in the last days…

EOG
I’ve been giving some love to EOG. It really needed it: lots of critical bugs (crashes!) and a “dirty” bug list on bugzilla. So, I cleaned up some EOG bugs by triaging and patching. I wrote a Roadmap for EOG 2.14 with the topics I think are relevant for the next stable version. Sorry Tim Gerla about all those messages on IRC! I just want to keep you informed. :-)

Mallard
I love Project Mallard. The GNOME docs really needs some revamping. Considering that the users don’t read docs before they use the software (they do it while they’re using it), the current “software manual” approach is not very nice. A context-based help is much more useful here. Some random ideas about this:

• We’ll need a good search feature to make it easy to find the right answers the user is looking for. This involves good indexing for the help topics.
• A new documentation for writing manuals will be necessary because the docs will be written using an hypertextual topic-based approach. Very diferent from the current linear one.

Cool new projects
Dogtail is a GUI test tool which will be VERY useful for QA stuff. It will be possible to reproduce bugs and perform several GUI tests by just writing Python scripts that interact with the user interface.

Tango (for GNU/Linux coherent desktop experience) and BetterDesktop (an interesting GNU/Linux usability effort) are great iniciatives!

Kill Wanda?
There is a very funny discussion about what should be done with the old fish Wanda. Don’t kill her! It has a very historical meaning!

Projecto Software Livre Bahia
Our local free software activism group has made its 2 years of existence! Congrats to all of us! Some photos from our little party.