Club Silencio

TextMate, here we come!

I know there are many people who like TextMate quite a bit, especially since it’s featured in the Ruby on Rails screencast. If you scroll down their page you’ll see that one of their killer features is “Expand triggers to full snippets”.

Today jessevdk showed up in #gedit with this super sweet present: a python plugin for gedit that let you do more or less the same, record any snippet and then automatically insert it: a small demo (ogg, 189 Kb, courtesy of Istanbul) it’s worth a thousand words.

Never reject a feature? Never reject a feature request!

Tim’s post is very interesting, but in my opinion should be changed in “Never reject a feature request“, which means that every time a feature is requested, it should not be dubbed as “crack”, but neither accepted as is: we should try hard to understand which problem and use case drives that request and try to come up with a solution to the underlying problem. The solution may or may not be the exact request proposed by the reporter: often who identifies a problem is not the best suited person to find the solution.

After all it’s Linus himself that often says that “the main job of a free software maintainer is to say no”

Murphy’s Law

(Sunday evening, #gedit)

kikidonk: so tomorrow is the big day?
me: yes! after months, tomorrow I am going to merge new_mdi into HEAD
kikidonk: cool!
me: I fixed distcheck errors and I have a test 2.13.0 tarball here... We really want to put a test tarball out in time for gnome 2.13.3. Unless something bad happens, I am going to do the merge tormorrow morning, now I am too tired to deal with last minutes problems. Night.
kikidonk: night

(Monday morning)

me: Hey, fixed the last distcheck problem in the merged tree, I'm going to commit in a bit
...no response...
me: anybody home?
...no response...
me: /me checks connection... Disconnected!

At this point I thoght, “Oh well, no problem. I’ll reconnect in some minutes”. It’s certainly not the first time my adsl line goes down. About an hour later I start to get annoyed and call the help desk and it turns out that the adsl of the whole (small) town is down! Thus defeating also my fallback plan to bring the laptop to the home of one of my friends and do the commit from there.

gedit 2.13.0

Despite the unexpected problems, new_mdi is now merged on HEAD and with gedit 2.13.0 you can taste all the new hotness!
2.13.0 is faster and lighter and features a load of improvements: draggable tabs, vfs saving, new plugins system that allows plugins to be written in python, a new interactive search UI (try ctrl+k) and many other things: see paolo’s mail.
What we really need now is a good deal of feedback and testing since no matter how careful we tried to be, it’s inevitable that some bugs found their way into the codebase. In particular we need help with things like a11y, multi head, bsd, solaris and in general all the things we have not a chance to test ourselves.
Before we get a load of duplicate reports, let me also note that there are a couple of known regressions that we decided to punt in order to get the tarball into gnome 2.13.3: autosave and the ‘shell command’ plugin. The first is already being worked on, while the shell plugin is a bit more complicated… we’ll try to get to it, but if someone is looking for a fun hack and wants to give it a try… :)
This also reminds me that our code for food bounties are still open until the release of 2.14.0 and apart from bugfixes there are many plugins that would be fun to write.