General – Page 6 – Olav Vitters

Pretty huge amount. Incomparable to any other GNOME release. In total, I’ve reviewed 0 of above patches btw. There have been freeze breaks for today as well…

March 13, 2011

External dependencies

Correcting Marks statement:

He talks about App Indicators, saying that “They didn’t even propose changes to core GNOME components to support application indicators.” Actually, we did, and those changes required App Indicators to be an external dependency. So we proposed that, and it was rejected. Repeat ad absurdum.

This is not correct. Applications can depend on a library without it being an external dependency. If it is not an external dependency, the support must be optional. This so distributions do not have to deal with ever increasing dependencies. We have various optional dependencies.

Furthermore, the library was not accepted (the ‘rejected’ is often interpreted as permanent rejection, while this was never meant in this way) for GNOME 3.0.x. Not the whole idea. Not the spec. Also, something similar can be proposed again for 3.2. Though really really suggest to at least assume we mean well, and understand the feedback that was given.

Unfortunately, I’m repeating what has been stated before.

What I find most unfortunate: I saw no email to release-team asking for clarification. I fail to see what the point is of continuing this via blogposts. I find it fairly strange way if the purpose is to actually have a constructive conversation.

Suggest the ‘assume people mean well’ once again. And ehr.. people are working for a long time on releasing GNOME 3.0.

March 1, 2011

Frustrations?

Hey Phil,

No need to be frustrated. Just talk to some people and you’ll notice that nobody is treated in any special way.

Do wonder what triggered this. Just the Canonical-Banshee thing?

Some comments:

For starters, some [2] people in the GNOME community moan about how Ubuntu doesn’t pull its weight upstream. They then make it difficult for Ubuntu-y folks to contribute things upstream.

Suggest to find better examples than Zeitgeist and app indicators. App indicators has already been discussed before. People already explained in on your blog, but in short: it was suddenly proposed, never noticed work on this being done, it went against the current heading of GNOME (gnome-shell and less libraries, integrating more into gtk+) plus (IIRC) it needed copyright assignment. Most importantly, I felt like almost all feedback was ignored. Feedback is very important, things can be addressed if communication happens. If not, I’ll probably vote against it as things have to be working in the long term (have to get the impression it will be supported for 5+ years). Zeitgeist: it isn’t developed upstream. Makes it difficult to follow progress. Really important for me to easily follow progress. Still, very cool technology, I’m just waiting for it to be used in a nice way across GNOME. And that is mainly why it isn’t in GNOME at the moment (the ‘cool technology’ vs ‘used nicely in GNOME’). This was given as feedback, so I don’t see why you’re using Zeitgeist as an example. Likely Zeitgeist will end up as an external dependency. I also don’t see Zeitgeist as Ubuntu-y. That’s actually a good thing. I don’t want anything which appears to be restrictive, don’t care which distribution/organization/company it is from. In practice of course most development might come from one organization.

I use Mandriva for many years. Over those years, they haven’t contributed significantly towards GNOME (KDE focussed, though a lot of their tools use Gtk+). Really does not matter how much is contributed. Though, this doesn’t mean people will not constantly ask for more contributions (the more contributors the merrier). That said, I don’t see Canonical doing much upstream, nor any limitations to not do that. Again, my view and I see it as something factual, not emotional.

Anyway, if you realize that things aren’t perfect I think it’ll be much easier. E.g. messages to release-team might be ignored for no reason. Doesn’t mean anything other than that it was not picked up. Some technology was propsosed and rejected for various reasons. Doesn’t mean it will always be rejected, or that there are reasons other than documented. Further, sometimes the reasons are explained in ways that what wasn’t intended (miscommunication).

Perhaps a cause is how the communication happens? E.g. avoid having any communication that not everyone in the world easily follow. Further, communicate in the places people expect. Might have avoided app indicators if everything started on desktop-devel-list and so on (though, ehr, not always the most productive mailing list).

I fully understand that Ubuntu and Canonical aren’t the same thing

From my perspective, whatever Canonical wants to do, will be done (e.g. Banshee thing). I don’t see this as negative, nor as positive. However, result of current situation is that direction of Ubuntu is strongly influenced by Canonical.

The method you use to make that money is subject to intense scrutiny

Just people voicing their opinions about what they think is right or wrong. It can be allowed by a licence, but you really don’t want everyone solely looking at what is exactly allowed by the small text / legal.

and insisting that all of their attempts to generate revenue fit into some warm, fuzzy picture of a benevolent cooperative for whom profit is incidental is unreasonable

This summary doesn’t reflect what feedback was given or what people don’t like. As such, I find it pretty disrespectful towards the people giving comments (talking about the posts on planet gnome).

start playing hard ball

Where I work (easy to find out, but in short: not a distribution), it won’t work long term. Sometimes you help your customer and/or vendor, sometimes they help you. Or as buzzwords: sustainability and cooperation.

chronic infighting

Chronic infighting? I don’t see any of that happening.

GNOME can understand and facilitate Canonical’s commercial goals

Ehrr… if Canonical wants to make money, go ahead. But don’t expect me to facilitate. I don’t even understand how it is meant when I think of the Canonical-Banshee incident (isn’t facilitating). Further, I work on things because I want to for various reasons.

I will be swallowing some of my pride by working on documentation for Unity and assigning the copyright to Canonical.

Talk to Michael Meeks how LibreOffice got *loads* more contributions immediately by not having copyright assignments (presentation @ FOSDEM).

Final comment

I probably said some stuff which probably will get explained in ways I didn’t intend, mean or expected.

February 25, 2011

Banshee and informing Ubuntu users

Note that Ubuntu users can be easily detected by their user-agent. Just check the user-agent string for ‘Ubuntu/’. Maybe we could put a ‘Friends of GNOME’-like banner on planet.gnome.org, www.gnome.org, and so on and politely request users to install a plugin/package to give the revenue back to the GNOME foundation again. The plugin could do this for Banshee, Amazon, Firefox Google search, etc in one go.

January 17, 2011

FOSDEM 2011, smoke free GNOME event on Sat evening

If you’re attending, please add your name on the GNOME Wiki. Don’t forget to mention if you want to a t-shirt (5 or 10 EUR, see wiki). There is also a GNOME event in a bar on Saturday evening. It will happen at « La Bécasse » where ~~there is a great collection of Belgian beers, particularly lambic, gueuze, and kriek~~ smoking is prohibited in the whole bar!!! From 19h30 to whenever you want. There will be more details available at the GNOME booth.

October 26, 2010

Communication

Seems a bit of criticism on the Unity announcement is being taken personally or as attacks or something. Please remind ourselves of the ‘Assume people mean well’ bit in the Code of Conduct? Not saying people aren’t following that, but seems feedback as well as criticism are taken in ways which, well.. appear weird. Especially on the Internet you’ll get a lot of different responses on anything you do.

If I read one blogpost, then I see various strong terms such as:

The elephant in the room
In-fighting
extremist people
religious about free software
Moral High Ground

I’m listing this just to show how it comes across to me. I don’t see any in-fighting on Planet GNOME. No extremist people, nothing (to be very clear: the blogpost I’m talking about is also on Planet GNOME, and I don’t think it is extreme, just weird). So it comes across to be as weird. Accusations without any justification.

Do want to clarify on one thing:

so they can direct themselves without waiting any longer

In case of problems with your Git account, just email accounts@gnome.org. Just to show in a sarcastic way how I think of a some of the reasoning behind Unity.

I think it is underestimated how much work a fork is (I see Ubuntu as forking GNOME). And I do not mind Unity, even if I would’ve rather seen them help out GNOME shell. Still, some of the argumentation behind various decisions is just weak (in general, not talking about the blogpost).

September 18, 2010

Storing passwords safely on Linux

I wanted an easy way to store the different logins and passwords for various sites. I prefer something which is really secure and is not automatically accessible/unlocks when I login. Tried using Seahorse (eventhough it will unlock the keyring on login), but it seemed to lack a userid field. Storing such info in the comments feels not right to me. Plus, sometimes I want to store a bit of extra information (stuff like secret question + answers.. I find them insecure and prefer to just put another password there).

Initially I looked at Console Password Manager, but unfortunately Mandriva didn’t have a package for it. Further, development seemed to have stalled a bit.

I’ve settled now on a GnuPG plugin for Vim. Really easy to use, plus I can access it easily via SSH. Only drawback is that it will show all the passwords when I unlock/edit the textfile, ideally Vim should fold everything and so I can unfold the password I need at that time.

September 18, 2010

Mageia — Fork of Mandriva

I was pretty unhappy with what was going on at Mandriva. Many (all?) employees were fired, etc. At GUADEC I was told to wait a bit before switching distributions (assume they were planning the fork). I still investigated other distributions, but didn’t switch yet.

Anyway, noticed today that a lot of people from the distribution and former employees are forking Mandriva as Mageia. The name will again will take me a few years to get used to, but happy to see the independence. Loads of people are already offering their help. Pretty awesome to see this happen.

August 21, 2010

Fun with Inkscape

August 2010 using Inkscape calendar extension

August 2010 with week numbers — August 2010 using Inkscape calendar extension and a patch I wrote to optionally show week numbers

The calendar extension is written in Python 🙂 Most difficult part was trying to find out what the minimum Python version Inkscape supports. Eventually I had to ask the devs and seems there isn’t anything written down (not even configure.ac). Relying on 2.5 was acceptable though.

August 10, 2010

Upstream

I think it is interesting to take GNOME and experiment with it. It might result in some really nice new insights. Still, calling such changes ‘upstream’ is completely wrong. That is not what has been done. Just be honest about what you are doing. I don’t think everyone has to work upstream, even if such experiments are not ideal as seen from a upstream/release-team perspective (as in: the more people working on GNOME, the better 🙂 ). I just hope that with this misrepresentation they’re not forgetting the maintenance costs (if you create something new, very likely you’ll have a big share of the maintenance for a long time or in short: no codedumps please). Anyway, let’s see what a different view will bring!