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Friday 25 April 2008

Live from GUADEMY

It feels like summer here. Oh, you might not know where "here" is: Valencia. I got invited to talk at GUADEMY, and so far it's pretty good. Good to see some friendly faces (can't find all the links to all blogs), and to be lost in translation again (although I can get a few words here and there if I listen carefully). Thanks to the organizers for having thought to me (and of course, to Novell for having let me come ;-)).

I finished my freedesktop.org specifications: are they boring? talk nearly a hour ago. I should probably put the slides somewhere, but basically it was about explaining the current status of the specifications and describing the huge list of things that we're doing wrong there. But there's no need to be negative about the future: there are some basic steps that we can follow to help improve the situation. Like better hosting, better update process, better consistency, more visibility. I'll probably talk a bit more about this in the future. The feedback was good, so at least, it seems I'm not thinking totally wrong ;-) Also, the talk was live-translated, which was pretty amazing, although I can't be sure I wasn't insulted in some way in the translations (nah, kidding, everybody is warmly welcoming here).

Oh, and I wish we had university campus in France as nice as the one in Valencia. It surely feels good. Or maybe it's just that it feels like summer :-)

Tuesday 18 March 2008

freedesktop.org & Google Summer of Code

GNOME and KDE both use a lot of technologies and projects which often falls under the freedesktop.org umbrella (hmm, freedesktop.org umbrella, that's a topic for yet another blog post I have to write; or you can read a french post I wrote last year) , and it totally makes sense for our pojects to help those projects whenever we can. For example, in the past, we've been open about Google Summer of Code projects that were not stricly related to GNOME (or KDE, although I can't speak for the KDE administrators). But for some reason, it never crossed our minds to go a step further and really announce this and cooperate on this. Well, after a brief mail exchange with Thiago, now it's fixed.

So all avahi, ConsoleKit, D-Bus, hal, HarfBuzz, NetworkManager, poppler, etc. (I'm sure I'm forgetting tons of projects) people out there, make sure to read Thiago's mail and to help us improve your projects! You just need ideas for Google Summer of Code projects and also time to mentors students.

Tuesday 4 March 2008

Two planets, two mailing lists

Woohoo, I've progressed in my quest to rule the world. Oh, those are secret plans, I shouldn't talk about them here, I guess. Anyway, I got added to Planet freedesktop.org and Planet SUSE. Hi there! Since I still didn't enter the aggressive mode for another secret plan (you know, the one about making french the only true language), only the english posts should show there. Yeah, I know, it's a bit sad... Did I hear someone say "yay, less blog entries from this guy?" ;-)

So, today, I want to tell you about two new freedesktop.org mailing lists which should be of interest to at least some people: ftp-release and distributions.

The goal of the first one is to be the place where announces of new releases for projects hosted by freedesktop.org should go. It seems a good idea since, for example, nobody knows when a new desktop-file-utils release is out and so it doesn't get packaged anywhere. I'd love to see some Xorg announces there, and also some telepathy, poppler, swfdec, etc. announces. You can simply cc the list if you still want to send the announces to your development mailing list. It would help make the world a better place, at least for some packagers, I guess. Sure, tt's not perfect since right now, maintainers need to write the mail themselves, but maybe at some point in the future, we'll be able to improve the freedesktop.org infrastructure and get this done automatically in some way.

The distributions list is an interesting project to get some cross-distribution collaboration. It's not about which one is better? or some other totally cool debate, but really about some low-level topics that could help improve the overall quality of distributions. Oh, and it's distributions as in free software distributions, not as in Linux or GNU/Linux distributions, so everybody is welcome, including our friends working on OpenSolariis, *BSD, etc. Lucas, who pushed for the creation of this list, has more details about it. I'm happy because this mailing list will make it possible for me to start working on another (small) secret plan that could be interesting to many distributions.

Hrm, maybe I have too many secret plans? I guess I'll just postpone a bit the one about ruling the world... Anyway, everybody, go subscribe to those two lists. I know you'll feel empty if you don't do so now.

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by Vincent