Author: Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

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.

Release wrangler

Henry the WranglerI’ve written a basic release script for Metacity following the standard release instructions, since I have to go through them every week or so anyway and I thought it would be better to automate them. Of course, it took about five times longer to write the script than to do a release, but I look on it as an investment.

If you want to use it yourself, it will probably not work for you straight away; I’d appreciate help generalising it if you’re interested, though. There is an lgo page about it.

(Later, Josh suggested that it might be similar or mergeable with ShipIt, which I haven’t looked at yet.)

One question I’m wondering about: a “point release” is when you go from, say, 3.1.x to 3.2.0, right? So what do you call it when you increment the micro version number, say from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5? Is there a special name for that?

2.21.8 is out

Thanks to Paolo Borelli, Iain Holmes, Havoc Pennington, Christian Persch, Thomas Thurman, and Alex R.M. Turner for improvements in this version.

– Windows on other workspaces which need attention appear in the alt-tab list too (Alex) (GNOME bug 333548)
– Remove deprecated function call (Christian) (GNOME bug 512561)
– New release script (Thomas)
– Made a start at improving the general number of comments (Thomas)
– Updated copyright year to 2008, and some other tiny fixes (Thomas)
– Don’t do anything unusual when the compositor frees a window (Iain)
– Mapping windows doesn’t mark them as damaged (Iain)
– Compositor uses the overlay window and not the root window (Iain)
– Fixed several list leaks (Paolo)
– Fixed warnings about printf formats (Havoc)
– Move source files into subdirectories of the src directory (Havoc)

Translations: Khaled Hosny (ar), Ihar Hrachyshka (be@latin), Petr Kovar (cs), Andre Klapper (de), Jorge González (es), Iñaki Larrañaga Murgoitio (eu), Seán de Búrca (ga), Yuval Tanny (he), Luca Ferretti (it), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Arangel Angov (mk), sandeep shedmake (mr), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Yannig Marchegay (Kokoyaya) (oc), Daniel Nylander (sv), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Baris Cicek (tr), Clytie Siddall (vi)

Source code here.

MD5sums:
485e9f160764f029d1b3bd82066ee495 metacity-2.21.8.tar.bz2
51bb19c95a489833674f29c9c7f8b3e8 metacity-2.21.8.tar.gz

2008-01-28: the Metacity Journal strikes back

Good evening and welcome back to the Metacity Journal. Tonight’s roundup of all things metacitous includes:

Recent bugs:

  • GNOME bug 333548: Alex Turner’s patch is going in tonight just as soon as I’ve rebuilt absolutely everything because my glib build was out of date.
  • GNOME bug 358674 (as previously discussed on these pages) continues to be a major discussion area. There seem to be three major attitudes about unidirectional maximisation (i.e. the ability to jump a window to full width or height but not vice versa). Currently we support it but only by a keybinding that’s difficult to find. The options are:
    1. Don’t support it at all (even as a keybinding)
    2. Support it as an extra action which can happen on double/middle/left click, which would cause the least risk of instability
    3. Support middle and right click on the maximise button, as kwin does.

    Your thoughtful and considered opinion is welcome.

  • GNOME bug 511826: Window decorations don’t change colour: needs confirming
  • GNOME bug 509165: we should allow a “separator” element in /apps/metacity/general/button_layout; nobody has yet provided a patch. Could be an interesting one to play with.
  • GNOME bug 512676: alt+right mouse button should resize; I believe this is dealt with already using alt+middle mouse button
  • GNOME bug 512561: G_GNUC_FUNCTION (which gets you the name of the current function, and doesn’t work in many cases) replaced with G_STRFUNC (which is much more reliable).

Blog activity:
It’s been a bit quiet, really.

In the meantime, do check out Devil’s Pie, an add-on to Metacity which lets you do things like start all terminals on one particular workspace.

Image: was The Cricketers, now a curry house called Devdas, St Albans. Photo by Gary Houston, public domain. I always feel things are going well when blog entries are organised enough to have photos. :)

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