Category: General

Nautilus

Following the Nautilus
going spatial thread, I’ve came to this screenshot of Mac OS’s Path Finder:

In this picture you can see it uses a different color (lightgray) for the hidden files,
which is, in my opinion, a very clever idea, since the current way Nautilus displays
hidden files (like all other files) makes it very difficult to deal with them. Having
a color distinction would make me re-enable the ‘Show hidden files’ option.

GNOME-DB

libgda/libgnomedb 1.0.0 are now packaged and ready to go. Just waiting on
the GNOME Office 1.0 release announcement. There hasn’t been almost any
change from 0.99.0, apart from a bug fixed by Akira and a little bit more
of API documentation (something we should work hard for the upcoming 1.0.x
releases).

Now that we’ve got 1.0 out, I think it is time to ask for their inclusion
in the development platform. Of course, following the GEP procedure 🙂
One of the things we’re going to start doing, regardless of whether they
are accepted or not in the development platform, is to follow the GNOME
release cycle, which will avoid situations like having a 1.0 as delayed
as it’s been, and for no special reason. It’s clear that having 6 months
release cycles helps in concentrating on new features by little steps,
which is something that seems useful for GNOME-DB also.

Of course, the other important thing after 1.0 is getting Mergeant to
a 1.0 release also. Let’s see what comes up from Vivien’s refactoring.

And, last but not least, we need applications to use libgda/libgnomedb for
their data management. There are already a few
applications
using them, but we really need to have it more widely used.
Having GNOME applications use libpq (PostgreSQL client library), libmysqlclient
(MySQL’s), etc, is, IMO, a waste of time. If all apps used the same data
access/management API, we could benefit from a lot of integration, like
having the data sources used in MrProject available to Gnumeric/Abiword,
for instance. Also, a simple point of configuration
(gnome-database-properties) for all data sources
should help users a lot.

Eurobasket

Spain lost the final against Lithuania 🙁

GNOME 2.4

Just installed the GNOME
2.4 Debian packages, and so far they seem to work pretty well. I just had a few
warnings for some packages (easily fixed by dpkg -i --force-overwrite)
which contained files already in other packages.

GNOME Network

For ZeroConf integration, the plan is to have a set of classes, in libgnetwork,
which allow other applications to discover services, via MDNS, SLP, etc. We are
lucky enough to have already a MDNS implementation
(gmdns),
which works, and which we want to integrate in our libgnetwork (just waiting
on yakk’s approval to do so). Once we’ve got the library, the plan is to start
writing tools that use the discovery features, or integrate that in already
existing applications. One of those new tools is to have a set of links,
in the network:/// Nautilus view, that display links to the discovered servers
for many services (HTTP, FTP, etc), similar to XD2’s ‘Network Neighborhood’
link.

GNOME-DB

Preparing as I write the 0.99.0 release of GNOME-DB, which hopefully will
be the final 1.0, to be released with Gnumeric 1.2 and Abiword 2.0 next week.

GNOME Network

I’ve accepted à lvaro’s
patch for the Personal Web Server tool. It is separated in two: a class
(GObject-based, of course) in libgnetwork (new library, where we intend to
add more functionality) and the PWS itself, which is a docklet icon for
the system tray. It works with Cherokee’s
libcherokee, and, yes, it works. There are still some things to be
fixed, but it’s a very good start. It is though not the best way to share
files, and we should have a long term plan that includes NFS, SMB, FTP, etc,
that is, integrate the tools into the already running services.

Also, we should think on having the download/upload manager stuff
contained in the libgnetwork library, so that we can get other applications
(web browsers, Nautilus, …) to use the same stuff.

GNOME Office

The 1.0 release of GNOME Office
has
been postponed, which means GNOME-DB 1.0 has also, since we are just
making the release for the sole purpose of the GNOME Office one.

GNOME Network

à lvaro has been working
on the Personal Web Server for gnome-network. Here’s a
screenshot.

Eurobasket

Spain is doing pretty well in the 2003
Eurobasket, with Pau Gasol being the MVP so far. With Yugoslavia
missing some of its stars, Spain having the best team in its history, and
Germany (one of the best European teams in the last championships) out of the
competition, I think the road to the gold medal is more and more clear for us!

Novell

I just got my first 2 mails from @novell.com! One of them for the private
web. I Now feel like aN employee!

I’ve been also visiting Novell’s
Forge, which is like the well-known Sourceforge, but for projects related
to Novell software. Among those projects, I found out about Netwhere
Client for Linux, which is, of course, a client for Netware networks.

gnome-network

A lot of new things today, like the probable inclusion of Emphetamine into
gnome-network. César Tapia is going to work on it.

Also, a lot of ideas are coming up about gnome-network (we should have created the
mailing list before :-), such as some sort of ZeroConf/SLP integration. From a first
look (not too deep though), it seems we could offer a set of SLP functions on a
shared library, and then have GNOME applications use that lib. Thus, Galeon (or
Epiphany, or whatever) can use that library to discover web servers on the network,
gFTP can use it to discover FTP servers, etc. This is how Mac Os X seems to do it.

There is not yet a clear decision on how to offer the file sharing stuff to users.
Using Apache’s public_html is one of the solutions talked
so far, although I am more and more convinced on just relying on GNOME System Tools’
file sharing tool (to be available soon) to do the job, thus making us support
all systems supported by GST.

No Software Patents

Due to the directive validating Software
Patents that will be voted this 1rst September at the European Parliament,
a lot of people from Hispalinux
have decided to protest by closing
their websites. This is for supporting the real demonstration
that will take place next Wednesday 27th August, in Brussels.

GNOME-DB

Today we have frozen both libgda and libgnomedb for the 1.0 release in a couple of
weeks. I hope the patch review thing works ok here, as it has done for Evolution.
Also, as we speak, GNOME-DB
site has been closed until the 27th, for the demonstration against
software patents.

GNOME-DB

Very nice to have Philippe using GdaXmlDatabase, since we forgot about it, and it had
a few non-working and other missing bits. Philippe has been using it and finding
the problems, and we have been fixing them, so we’ll have a fully working
GdaXmlDatabase for 1.0.

This class will be, with no doubt, one of the nice features of libgda, and which makes it
a generic data management library, not really 100% dependent on a running database server.
That is, GdaXmlDatabase can now (thanks to Philippe) be used by a lot of applications,
not related to databases at all. This class offers a way to store, query and modify an
XML file representing a database. It is used in libgda to import/export databases, but can also
be used as a data storage, like you do with Berkeley DB, for instance, but much better,
since you can have any number of fields, you can query the data via SQL, and, for using
it, you have to deal with the really nice GdaDataModel class. I am in fact going to use it in
gnome-backup,
which I hope will be a good example to convince other people to use it.