A few weeks ago, I migrated desktop-file-utils from CVS to git, but after pushing it, I realized I could have done the migration in a slightly better way. Ouch. Enters one hero, Tollef: he was kind enough to allow me to kill the old git repository and start from scratch. This means desktop-file-utils finally lives in git. Woohoo!

It enabled me to commit various patches I had done locally in the meantime (I really didn't want to use CVS again, so I was waiting for git ;-)), and then to release desktop-file-utils 0.16. It's the first release since February 2008! Two years without a tarball is quite bad, especially since there were fixes waiting in CVS. But everything is good again, and we should now be back on track, with more frequent releases.

There are a bunch of changes in this release, including improved checks when validating a .desktop file. Of course, there's always the risk that this will result in files that are now invalid while they used to be marked as valid, but the new future error type of warnings should mitigate this. The other good news is that there's only one enhancement request opened in bugzilla, and I'm not even sure there's something we can do about it. But I'm confident you've already find a bug, so don't forget to file it ;-)

It all looks perfect, doesn't it? Well, there's one big thing missing, though: a regression suite. I still can't believe that we're releasing a validator for .desktop files without a regression suite, and I'm convinced there have been regressions in the past (or even in this release) that went unnoticed. I'd really love to have a few people help create tons of .desktop files that would stress the validator and make sure it validates what the specification says. It's an easy way to contribute: it just requires free time and understanding of the specification. Please contact me if you want to give it a try!