For some reason I felt very productive yesterday and managed to do lots of stuff, like fix some API docs, do some gstreamer testing, work on a little theme project, do a libcroco testbuild, add a spec.in to libcroco, write most of todays GNOME summary etc.
Been having some trouble getting Lush ready for a relase due to a bad cut’n paste bug in Sodipodi. Hopefully some friendly prodding of Lauris on my part will get that issue resolved, hopefully he also fix the way sodipodi cut’n paste in general to allow for pasting into Abiword and Gnumeric etc.
A lot of my time yesterday where spent on trying to understand the Metacity theme format. It took me some hours, but I think I finally figured it out, and increased my understanding of XML at the same time. Havoc do offer a file describing the theme format, but of course looking at other themes is the primary source of documentation. And here XML shows what in my opinion what amounts to both a weakness and strength for this kind of use. You see I had big trouble comparing two theme definition files yesterday, and this is partly due to me not having been exposed to enough XML yet, because although they did the same thing and both where valid XML the syntax of a XML file can vary a lot within the boundaries of valid XML. So of course people who have learned XML in different settings/contexts will write the XML theme files in quite different ways, making taking something done in one file and just pasting it into the other not so easy since the files will look and be organized very differently. So while XML do provide flexibility and easy programatic access to the configuration data, its extreme flexibility do give graphics artists and other non-coders a hard time trying to follow what happens since so many themes do it differently.
The GStreamer team finally got moving on 0.6.1 yesterday. Ronald, Benjamin and Wim seems to be both fixing bugs and merging patches full speed now, so hopefully a great 0.6.1 will be out soon. I hope Thomas manages to find some time to help out too, since there are lots of build related bugs in bugzilla it would be nice to get fixed before 0.6.1