my blog

Wednesday 26 March 2008

GUADEC news

I discussed with Baris at the end of last week, and he told me he can't create some buzz around GUADEC because he doesn't have a blog yet. So let me be his slave for a few minutes :-)

First, and that's important, there's the deadline for paper submission which is really soon now: it's on March 30th. In case you don't have a calendar right in front of you, it means this week is the last week to submit your talk. So if you're thinking of talking about your latest great idea at GUADEC, don't wait and send your talk proposal now!

The GUADEC team also worked hard on getting sponsors. This is still a work in progress, but here's a the beginning of the results of this work with a preliminary list of sponsors:

  • Gold sponsors: Linux Foundation, Novell
  • Silver sponsors: Igalia, Mozilla Corporation, Opened Hand

More are of course coming soon and will be announced in a near future. Many thanks to those five organizations, and congratulations for being the first sponsors! This event wouldn't be so successful without all the sponsors that help us each year, so it's great to see them continue their support of our community.

I think I'm done with my slave status and I can be free again! First, I'm really happy to see that Novell is among the first sponsors to support GUADEC ;-) While it probably doesn't mean anything for a lot of people, it's important to me to see that the company I work for is responsive when it comes to supporting a project I love. Anyway. Don't know about you, but I'm quite excited about this GUADEC. I mean, I can't wait to go to Istanbul, and I'm confident the conference will rock as usual. Why am I so confident? Well, there are so many reasons: lots of great people (and friends!), interesting topics to discuss, lots of fun, a beautiful town, etc. And hopefully, Diego will be there and we'll be able to meet for one of the most important event of all times: our second round of the epic ice cream battle.

[01:15] | [GNOME] | [#463] | [9 comments]

Saturday 22 March 2008

What I've been doing today...

vuntz@buildmachine ~/>./bin/create-summaries --output-database ~/data.db
vuntz@buildmachine ~/>python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Sep 21 2007, 22:46:31)
[GCC 4.2.1 (SUSE Linux)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sqlite3
>>> db=sqlite3.connect('/suse/vuntz/data.db')
>>> c=db.cursor()
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from patch where srcpackage = (select id from srcpackage where name = "gnome-panel")').fetchone()[0]
25
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from rpmlint').fetchone()[0]
7120
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from rpmlint where type="not-listed-as-documentation"').fetchone()[0]
6388
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from srcpackage where version < upstream_version').fetchone()[0]
26

Quick answers to some FAQ:

  • yes, I know, the UI isn't really user-friendly ;-)
  • this demo is really short, more can be done right now. And after a bit more work, there'll be some more data in there to query.
  • there are certainly bugs when collecting the data, so I wouldn't trust the returned values. It still gives a rough idea of how things are.
  • it's only working on packages where upstream is hosted on the GNOME FTP server. That's mainly for convenience reasons; adding other packages later shouldn't be hard.
  • yes, there are lots of gnome-panel patches in our package. I'll look at them in a not too distant future.
  • most of the rpmlint warnings (6388 out of 7120 -- this includes some false positives, but still) seem to be related to this bug. The good news is that I attached a simple patch earlier today.

I love my job :-)

[02:36] | [openSUSE] | [#462] | [2 comments]

Thursday 20 March 2008

Fixing packaging conventions/guidelines

I fixed the openSUSE package conventions about .desktop files a few minutes ago. No big change there (see the details of the changes), but it contained some outdated information and some errors. I was especially annoyed by the fact that it was talking about the GenericName key for tooltips instead of the Comment key: because of this, there are some patches in our packages to change the .desktop files to use the GenericName key instead of the Comment one. The page can probably do with some more work to clarify things, and I guess I'll do this in the future.

It reminded me that last year, I contacted someone to change the Fedora packaging guidelines because the example was not a valid .desktop file. Do other distributions have packaging guidelines or conventions related to .desktop files? If yes, please tell me where I can look at them so I can check that they're fine :-)

[16:50] | [openSUSE] | [#461] | [4 comments]

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.

[15:22] | [freedesktop.org] | [#460] | [one comment]

Friday 14 March 2008

Reading comments about GNOME 2.22.0

After a GNOME release, I generally spend some time reading the comments about the release on various websites. I'm generally quite passive, since I don't reply to any of them, but it's always interesting. After reading a lot of comments, it's quite easy to find out that there are some standard categories for the comments:

  • comments from happy users who are excited about this release, either because they love GNOME in general, or because some feature they were waiting for got added or a long-standing bug finally got fixed.
  • comment raising some valid concerns in a constructive way. Even if it's saying something bad about our project, even if I disagree, it's still a constructive comment, and therefore it's useful.
  • comments from people who seem to just have some irrational hate for GNOME. Those ones always make me a bit sad since, to me, it sounds like "what you're doing is crap".
  • comments that are good or bad, but really subjective, often because it's about something which is a matter of taste, like the default theme or background.
  • comments from users that are a bit sad that some bug wasn't fixed yet. We should really have people gathering those kind of comments, since it gives an idea of what people care about and so it's some feedback we should consider.
  • mmh, I forgot at least one category ;-)

And quite often, there's one comment that just makes me happy. For 2.22.0, this comment made my day, especially the last paragraph:

Software development ain't easy, especially not in the decentralized volunteer world of free software, but the Gnome guys seem to have it down pretty well. Kudos to them.

I can think of many things that could be improved in what I'd call our "release management process" (this name is a bit too restrictive in this context, but I can't think of a better one), but let's not forget that it doesn't mean we're doing bad. And seeing people noticing this makes me feel good :-)

[19:46] | [GNOME] | [#459] | [8 comments]

- page 27 of 119 -

by Vincent