Club Silencio

Sardegna

It’s clear regular blogging it’s not my thing… Oh well. Currently I am in Sardegna for work and I’ll be here for most of the month. This also means no internet out of work hours. If any fellow gnome user/developer in the Cagliari area wants to get in touch for a beer and a chat feel free to send me an email.

gedit

I just released gedit 2.17.5 for the second GNOME 2.17 beta. No major changes in gedit in this release cycle, but a good deal of bugfixes and little improvements. Beside it’s great to see the third party plugins community very active: every day new plugins pop up and not just developer oriented ones, but also for translators, latex users and so on.

There is still a known major crasher bug in the current release of gedit, which is due to the use of mmap. It turns out that mmap is not as beautiful as some depict it: it makes very hard to deal with I/O errors, which are not so rare with CDs, floppies etc. The bugreport now has a patch that seems to work, but it involves catching SIGBUS signal etc and C signals scare me, so I want to double check it before committing it. If any C gurus have advices I am all ears. Long term we should just replace the current document-loader object with one using GIOChannels which also gives us the opportunity to improve encoding conversion. In fact we already have a first cut of such code, but we are not sure that trading a known, fairly rare crasher with an unknown set of bugs this late in the 2.18 cycle is a good idea…