2008-02-27: Metacity Journal

When things are this busy I should be doing these daily.

Bugs

  • We reported earlier, gentle reader, that the rounded corners preview GNOME bug 460018 was solved in both trunk and the gnome-2-22 branch by Thomas Wood. We made probably the last release of 2.21 specially to include the patch.
  • GNOME bug 490668 – one of the accessibility problems that needs work: immediately after startup, nothing has focus, which breaks Orca. Shouldn’t be hugely difficult to fix. Anyone willing to spare a few braincycles?
  • GNOME bug 509165 – separator values. Andrea has found a new solution which doesn’t involve any problems with the visibility rules. This needs testing, which is due shortly after this post.
  • GNOME bug 517722 – more work on Dietrich’s expand patch.
  • GNOME bug 518325 – someone says a function is broken; Elijah agrees and says it should go away anyway.
  • GNOME bug 518596 – should we not have a .metacity directory? If not, what should we have instead? A post is forthcoming on this blog on the matter.
  • GNOME bug 518608 (launchpad bug 192309) – segfault; needs triage
  • GNOME bug 518629 (launchpad bug 116807) – someone complained that the arrangement of desktops is lost if you remove the applet which arranges the desktops. Since this is the program which actually requests the arrangement, I’m not sure how else it could be, really.
  • GNOME bug 518917 – we are now valid C89 all the way through.

Checkins on branches/gnome-2-22

Checkins on trunk

Links
Nothing much interesting.

Translations

Till next time…

2008-02-20: Metacity Journal (with thanks to Rio!)

Rio is helping me edit the Metacity Journal tonight. Thanks, Rio!

Bugs
It’s been a busy couple of days!

  • GNOME bug 106249 — Matthias comes up with a working patch for the skip_taskbar problem
  • GNOME bug 138290 — Rob thought window placement had its problems, but Thomas wasn’t sure what they were; we need to ask the GIMP folks
  • GNOME bug 151818 — “Open new windows centred”; it’s still really a Devil’s Pie thing
  • GNOME bug 328210 — Alexey Rusakov found a bug in our configure script (we need to make a regression test for this soon)
  • GNOME bug 342565 — should it take effort to move a window away from a xinerama edge
  • GNOME bug 448183 — our EWMH support allowed programs to resize OR move, but not both at once
  • GNOME bug 498812 — appears to have fixed itself :)
  • GNOME bug 515773 — a possibly contentious question: should errors which are reported by Metacity be shown as Metacity errors in the logs, or should we attempt to figure out the name of the broken program and pretend that program produced them?
  • GNOME bug 517722 — new contributor Dietrich Rothe has come up with an interesting idea about windows which expand to the maximum size available

Checkins on trunk

Links

Translations

  • On branches/gnome-2-20: ne by pachimho
  • On branches/gnome-2-22: gl by icq
  • On trunk: fi by ituohela, oc by ymarcheg

2008-02-18: the journal becomes a little more manageable

You know, I miss the little photographs of pubs we used to have when I did it by hand. I will look into adding those into the script.

Bugzilla
Thomas closed a ton of bugs. The script has not yet been fixed to make the output beautiful and it would take ages to write it all up, so your chronicler is not including this section today. You can see some of it in the checkins section.

Checkins on trunk

(Things I need to fix in the journal script: we need to stop including ChangeLog in all the commits. Also it’s interesting that newly-added files don’t show up; they should.)

Translations

  • On branches/gnome-2-22: nl by wbolster
  • On trunk: be@latin by iharh, nl by wbolster

2008-02-17: just as much of a journey of discovery for me as it is for you

Over the last few months we’ve had a recurring feature called the Metacity Journal. Every day or so we listed bug activity, checkins, and mentions in the press and other people’s blogs. However, it took about half an hour or more for your chronicler to collate all this information every morning, and it became apparent that it could more easily be done by a script.

What we have here is the first version of the results of that script. This run retrieved several months’ worth of information, but later runs will only show new changes since last time. The results were collated by the script and automatically posted as a draft, then scribbled on and had parts removed by the human editor. The script will become available within the next few days once it has been generalised and tidied up a little. Your comments are, as always, very welcome.

Bugzilla
The script created a lot of information because it was the first run; I’ve cut it down to just the last few lines.

In the future we need to collapse all comments for the same bug onto the same line.

Checkins on trunk
This is simpler because it’s only been tracking since Metacity was branched.

In the future we should pick up bug numbers from the checkin message and display them there.

Links
Again, a ton of them, and I have only shown the last few.

In the future we need to drop any link containing the word “theme”, since we never link to posts about themes here.

Translations

  • On branches/gnome-2-22: fi by ituohela
  • On trunk: LINGUAS by runab, fi by ituohela, gl by icq, ne by pachimho

I think that wasn’t bad for a first try. “After a while, the style settles down a bit, and it starts telling you things you actually wanted to know…”

My goals for 2.23

These are just my (Thomas’s) thoughts; I haven’t discussed them with the others yet.

  1. A decent set of regression tests that gets run every night. (This is under development.)
  2. Documentation of every function and struct.
  3. No outstanding bugs in the bug queue; everything needs to be resolved (maybe wontfix), be being worked on, be scheduled to have work done on it, or have a reason we’re not working on it right now.

Bug hit list

Thomas’s bug queue for the next few days:

  • GNOME bug 515152 – done
  • GNOME bug 515402 – transcription error; find correct bug
  • GNOME bug 509165 – visibility rules are more complex than I can deal with; comment this and find an answer
  • GNOME bug 151818 – needs a separate blog post to itself (FIXME)
  • GNOME bug 515019 – patch works; closed.
  • GNOME bug 510667 – looks good to me; would like to hear Iain’s comments.

Also: there is apparently a patch in accepted-commit-now limbo.

Patch wrangler

While I was committing release-wrangler.py, I thought I’d also include patch-wrangler.py, which (once given a patch number) downloads Metacity trunk, applies the patch, configures, and makes. It would be better if it could figure out the project name given the patch so that it was usable on other projects, which is possible through scraping bugzilla, but that might make the bugzilla admins unhappy.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.