25 août 2010
Shell Yes! — 1st Issue
9:42 - GNOME
Some would have named it OMG! GNOME SHELL! but Jon gave an excellent "Shell Yes!" talk at GUADEC (the videos, they are coming!), and that title is really nice so I decided to reuse it.
Many things are happening in and around the shell, but rare are those with the time to follow whatever happens in the git repositories, wiki pages, mailing list, or IRC channel. So here I am, I don't promise something very regular, this won't be the "weekly shell news", but whenever I get a stack of news, I'll try to post…
An initial design proposal for the date panel has been posted to the wiki : current time is always visible on the top bar, but expanding this panel gives additional information on world time and appointments.
The calendar widget shows days with appointments in bold and slightly lighter type. Current day is prelit with the same glow background as active items in the top bar. Selecting a day replaces the agenda on the right with one specific to that day. The panel uses a two column layout with a dotted line separator to avoid menu entries to span across very wide space.
Sean Wilson has been playing with CSS, creating a few alternative themes, even if themability is not a goal at the moment, this shows how well the technologies are suited to graphic experiments. It has been proposed to Sean to look into application startup animation, hopefully he will come with something really nice.
Codewise it has been a complicated ride since GTK+ 3 removed many GDK drawing functions, that were used by librsvg, Mutter and others, but things are getting in shape again, and we should be back to the normal situation where building and testing the Shell is easy.
This also delayed the new design, presented at GUADEC, as Florian put that branch to rest during the breakage, he is now getting back to it, with platform stability coming back we will sure get it soon.
5 août 2010
Radio Esperanzah! 2010
12:36 - Radio
Cette année encore, l'association Autres-M-Ondes et plusieurs radios, dont Panik, organisent une radio éphémère sur le festival Esperanzah!; même dispositif que ce qui était utilisé pour radio RMLL, en plus gros, vingt personnes, deux studios, captation des concerts, etc.
Studio encore vide, Floreffe, 5 août 2010
De mon côté je m'occuperai encore, pas tout seul heureusement, du montage des interviews, cartes blanches et cie, et des concerts, et on publiera un maximum de tout ça en podcasts au fil des jours sur le site de radio Esperanzah!.
2 août 2010
My GNOME Contributions
20:12 - GNOME
I am all with Leonardo, it's good to have "volunteers" as the first contributor to GNOME.
After Dave gave his talk at GUADEC my comment was "this is a partial view, commits are not everything", I was certainly not thinking about Canonical involvment then (but about this article (in French) on gender and computer). Anyway, we do value contributions in code more than the rest, and I believe we should pay attention to this, and be sure we give the same value to the work being done by translators, designers, artists, bug triagers, etc. (I acknowledge this sounds like "yada yada yada").
But what about my GNOME contributions? Maintaining JHBuild? Developing library.gnome.org? Helping in the release team? Perhaps I am particularly unlucky but none of those found their ways into Dave's report. Too bad, but to be honest I was aware of that beforehand as Dave contacted me as he thought there was perhaps an error in his count, because my commit level was much lower than what he expected :)
Last but not least, another of my numerous uncounted contributions is the weekly commit digest, and this could well be the one that gave me the more thanks at GUADEC, I really appreciate it, and while I once thought of stopping at the hundredth issue, I will most certainly continue them for a while. Thank you all.
29 juillet 2010
GUADEC days
9:15 - GNOME
Long days at GUADEC... Discussing with many teams about how they feel for September, with regads to their work, and the overall picture, and then release team meeting on Monday evening, where we reached a general agreement in favour of a delay. Then back to discussing this proposal, in the Hogeschool lobby, in the advisory board, getting more feedback, refining things.
More drafting of emails & slides on Wednesday morning and finally we took the opportunity of Vincent "Building a strong post-3.0 GNOME story" talk to get the word out.
So if you haven't seen it already: GNOME 3.0 in March 2011.
People are loving the release team, get your sticker at the infodesk (thanks Ryan)
This was not easy, and it was especially difficult for me as I have been running GNOME Shell for months, experiencing all the progress, also because I have been so insistent with so many people to have their modules ported to GTK+ 3.
Of course it's not wasted work (I'd feel so bad if it was), and we actually need to have more modules getting a --with-gtk={2.0,3.0} configure flag (look at this commit in gcalctool for an example), and ported to GSettings (the target date is sill September), etc.
There are still two days to discuss things here, if you have any comment just grab Vincent, Andre, Olav, Karsten, Fred or myself.
24 juillet 2010
Building GNOME 2.31
16:39 - GNOME
I started a draft of this post ten days ago, it started with "For the first time in many months there are now 223 (out of 245) modules building correctly on one of the buildbot slaves", we are now at 234 modules (ouf ot 247), also I wrote we were in a better shape than ever, and this still holds true, and this is despite the ongoing technology transitions (GTK+ 3, GSettings, GApplication...).
Reaching a low number of build failures is really important, as it makes it possible to know about all of them in details, to notice changes, and to react quickly. The current situation is as is:
- libproxy is failing looking for some mozilla js header (reported against jhbuild as bug 623768, I would set it up with --disable-mozilla but it's a cmake module and I don't know if it can be switched off…
- evolution is failing on the deprecation of GtkNotebookPage (bug 624534), ditto for gdl (624636).
- glade3 has almost been ported to GTK+ 3, the remaining part is to get the toplevel project widgets rendered in offscreen windows, Juan Pablo Ugarte is working on this (bug 594957)
- cheese, the 3.0 branch has just been merged and it depends on the mx clutter toolkit, this is just temporary and Filippo Argiolas will include the necessary code directly Cheese soon.
- libchamplain still need to be ported to GTK+ 3, but this requires clutter-gtk, Emmanuele Bassi wrote "the plan is to release clutter-gtk 1.0 depending on gtk3.0. whether this plan actually comes together depends on me finding a week of time for fixing clutter-gtk for 1.0, or people helping me", so go and propose your help…
- telepathy-glib fails when building its vala part as vala didn't support the latest changes in gobject-introspection, bug 624772 tracked this and it has been fixed, so telepathy-glib will be fixed when a new vala release gets out. In turn this will also fix the folks and empathy modules.
- gnome-color-manager is failing due to a missing libgudev on the build slave, unfortunately installing it from a distribution package will also install glib development packages, and this could mess things.
- there is some linking error with gnome-shell, with missing symbols around gjs, or mozjs, but I couldn't find anything obvious, and it builds fine locally, so I didn't dig far.
- glibmm has an error for a few errors, around gdbus, probably an API change not yet reflected.
- and last, hamster-applet looks like it is missing some file, but it is using was as build system, and this discouraged me last time I looked.
Of course you're welcome to set up and maintain your own buildbot slave (unfortunately at the moment it requires to have a fixed IP address (bug 621236), just hop in #build-brigade, send an email to build-brigade-list@, or find me at GUADEC :)
See you!