GNOME Hackers Meeting
Had last weekend the GNOME Hackers Meeting in Pamplona. Overall it was great, with a few small
errors, but that we can easily fix in future meetings of this kind. Finally, 24 people showed
up, which was enough to fill the computer room we had available for the meeting.
We started with each one’s presentation; from the usual people
(Alo,
Acs,
the Galicians,
Garnacho,
Carlos,
Alberto, Juanjo, Dani) to some locals (Javier, the University person that helped in
making this meeting happen, and some people from the Navarra and Euzkadi
LUGs). Then we passed to projects presentations.
Acs talked about the stuff he’s been working on, that integrates Planner and Evolution.
First, he’s written an importer that lets Planner import contacts from Evolution. Then,
an Evolution Data Server tasks backend that uses Planner files as the data storage.
Then the Carlos’ (Carlos Garnacho
and Carlos GarcÃa) showed their
current work for GNOME System Tools 1.2. It is a disks administration tool and
Samba/NFS
shares administration tool. Great work.
Juanan presented his ideas for getting the GNOME
Programming book back to life. Great but simple ideas is what he showed us, with the clear
intention of having a 1.0 version as soon as possible. He did, after the presentations, a working group
with the people that were interested in helping, where a lot of cool ideas and todos were decided to
get the 1.0 version out.
The people from Igalia presented their current
work on Fisterra, the free ERP they have been
developing for a few years now. What they’re working on right now is on an architecture, similar to
Java Beans but based entirely on GNOME technologies, that helps a lot in writing the GUI part of any
accounting/financial/invoicing/etc application.
At the end of the projects’ presentations, I talked about the Evolution architecture and how to help
in the project, along with cool hacking ideas, like the ones available in the bounties page. The second day, I did
a hacking session live, where I showed how to get a working build environment with jhbuild, which
modules are needed for Evolution, and, much more important, the process needed for fixing a bug. We
got bug 61978
which seemed easy enough to not lose too much time explaining internal things of Evolution and
Evolution Data Server. The purpose was just to show how to do the patching, how to get approval, and
I think it had good results, since some people showed up a lot of interest in continue helping.
In another hacking session, Garnacho implemented a Nautilus extension for GNOME System Tools’ new
shares administration tool, for having a ‘Share Folder’ menu item in the Nautilus context menu
for folders. It was great to see it being developed, but I think it was a bit hard for newbies,
since there were a lot of new concepts (Bonobo components, .server files, Bonobo::Listener interface, etc)
that needed a longer explanation. Anyway, the extension was developed, so the result of the session
was great.
On Sunday afternoon, before giving an end to the meeting, we signed the papers for establishing
GNOME Hispano as a legally-established
non-profit association here in Spain. This will help us getting money for conferences (like the
GUADEC-ES) or to sponsor some
projecs (like the book).
Overall, a great meeting, and looking forward to have similar ones more often, since even
though just a few people were at the meeting, the results can be considered quite good: a few more
hackers (one of them confirmed, not sure about the others, time will tell), some useful code implemented
live, and a lot of fun hanging around with the GNOME Hispano people. Will post some photos as soon
as possible, but in the meanwhile, have a look at the ones
taken by alo.