Author: Thomas Thurman

All my mailing lists, including all Ubuntu and GNOME lists and my diocesan mailing list, go into the same folder. So I was a little baffled at first to read a post on the diocesan list saying “Ubuntu: Logo design contest seeks to convey General Convention theme“. Strange how certain meanings of words become the primary ones in your mind.

Scene: Coffee room, early morning.

Me: …and you know I wanted my comments in light green, and I know curses has a colour called light green, but for Emacs that’s the bold form of the colour green. But the thing is that Emacs uses rgb.txt colours, and there is one called LightGreen, but then what if you run in text mode? It uses the same colours, so it goes in and says, what colour is the closest to LightGreen? Aha, it’s yellow. So you get comments coming out in brown if you ask for LightGreen. I stared at that for so long before I worked it out.

Coworker: …

Me: And that concludes your rant for the day.

Coworker: You only get three; choose your next two carefully.

In unrelated news, writing all this Metacity test business has taught me stuff I never knew I never knew about the deep ways of X. It’s actually not as horrible as people make out, just extraordinarily complicated and yet fundamentally simple at the same time.

In further unrelated news, Carmen has now reached Minnesota in her house-moving roadtrip across the continent. I’ve been working on the Facebook application (much the most fun thing I’ve ever done with Facebook) and the website. You might enjoy reading her writeup of the first day or the second day, or looking at some photographs of Wisconsin.

Still working on Metacity testing back here. Move along, nothing to see yet.

In unrelated news, Mildred Loving, the person whose 1967 lawsuit Loving v. Virginia overturned all US laws which forbade people with one colour of skin to marry people with another, died on Friday. She made a statement on the fortieth anniversary of the case last year, which bears repeating now in her memory:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Ydy wir. Mi ges i ebost llynedd sy’n dweud: peidiwch â siarad am offeren ar Planed GNOME; dydy hwn ddim yn Planed Eglwys. Ac mi atebes i, peidiwch â siarad bolocs: ffenestr i’r bywydau pobl GNOME ydy’r blaned, on’d ydy?

(I got an email last year complaining that I wrote about my everyday life, including mentioning going to mass at one point, which suggested that I should have restricted such posts to “Planet Church”. I told them where to go.)

Someone has suggested a fix for the problem where Metacity doesn’t give up the selection on the compositor when you replace it. A solution should be coming soon.

I still need to write up our goals for 2.24. I think I know what they are now.

I’m putting the bugzilla attachments thing to one side for a while until we have more consensus about what to do with it.

A lot of good ideas on the Metacity testing post. Still thinking them over.

To recap, bugzilla.gnome.org (henceforth bgo, of which I am nothing but an enthusiastic user) is running a rather heavily patched version of Bugzilla 2.x. One of the changes from 2.x is a system to let people set a patch’s status using a drop menu from any one of a number of options (including “obsolete”, “reviewed”, “rejected”, “committed”, “commit after freeze”, and so on), rather than simply the boolean “obsolete” or “not obsolete”.

In the meantime, Bugzilla 3.x has evolved a separate system of flags for greater control over a patch’s status, so that you can have a number of not-quite-boolean flags set on or off or maybe for each bug.

There is an idea, tracked as GNOME bug 433607, that bgo should switch to Bugzilla 3.x, which would be lovely and allow a lot more fun things such as XML querying of bugs, which is something I really want. Last year sometime in 433607 I said I would have a try at porting the bgo status system over to 3.x, and I’ve finally had time to do that over the last few days. Here’s the result.

However, I put this into Mozilla bug 431438 which was immediately marked as a duplicate of Mozilla bug 353690, which is saying that flags (in the 3.x sense) should be able to have arbitrary values. This won’t be released for another year until Bugzilla 4.x. So I suppose either we stick with 2.x, go to 3.x but apply the patch locally, go to 3.x and find a provable way to convert all existing statuses to 3.x flags, or wait for 4.x.

Lychee tea keeps me going!

I am aiming to build a set of unit and regression tests for Metacity for 2.24. The idea is to run Metacity in a sandbox X server (Xnest at first, and Xvfb when things have settled down) and run a test on it in a simple harness. This would be run automatically after every checkin, or every night, or both.

The usual way to do this would be using something like dogtail, but that’s not an option because Metacity’s menu and buttons are not accessible. (Should they be? That’s another question, but one I’d like an answer to.)

Perhaps the answer is to have a special window property called _METACITY_TEST or something which holds a ton of test information unless it’s compiled out (which it would be by default). We’d still need to find a way to simulate clicking certain buttons or whatever, unless maybe we could query the dimensions of a button and fake up a click message somehow.

I have a bunch of ideas about how to do this, but if anyone would like to hand me some clues, now’s a great time…

Debian bug 477454 … oh dear.

I was going to write a short essay here about the “given enough eyeballs” dictum, why and how code can grow old gracefully, and the excellent news that, thanks to Erwann Chenede, today’s Metacity release fixes the window-cascading bug that people have occasionally been complaining about, but I ended up writing it all in a Metacity Journal post, instead. I think you should all read the Metacity blog, of course.