GNOME Summary: August 16-20, 2002

This is the GNOME Summary for 2002-08-16 - 2002-08-20
    
==============================================================
Table of Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------

1. Return of Medusa
2. Gstreamer state of affairs
3. gftp in gnome CVS
4. ZDnet looks at Evolution
5. Abiword table support moving forward
6. GNOME 2 todo list.
7. Bugs getting fixed
8. Gnumeric gets Pango groove
9. Gtk# 0.4 is out
10. GNOME in Arabic moves forward
11. Hacker Activity
12. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
13. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. Return of Medusa
--------------------------------------------------------------

One of the libraries developed by Eazel as part of Nautilus was Medusa.
Medusa was a library which provided much of the search and indexing
functionality for Nautilus. Unfortunatly due to some bad bugs Medusa
never got wide distribution and Eazel had to waive the white flag before
the bugs could get fixed. Rebecca Schulman who created the library while
at Eazel is still working on it however and this week discussion broke
out on the nautilus development mailing list if maybe the time for
re-inclusion of medusa is coming closer. One of the cool things about
the Medusa library is that in addition to providing basic file search
capabilities to Nautilus is adds a module for indexing all textfiles on
your system. This capability can also be extended to other type of files
giving you a searchable index of all supported documents on your system.
Anyway the time for the return of Medusa depends on when Rebecca or one
of the other talented hackers in the Nautilus community gets it and the
corresponsing GUI code in Nautilus back up to speed. Personally I hope
this will be sooner rather than later. 


==============================================================
2. Gstreamer state of affairs
--------------------------------------------------------------

In order to help the wider GNOME community get a feel for the current
state of GStreamer I recently wrote a short status report. It tries to
give a small report on where the multimedia framework stands currently.

        http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/1504/0/9383806/

==============================================================
3. gftp in gnome CVS
--------------------------------------------------------------

A long time favourite application in the GNOME community has been the
gftp ftp client. Brian Masney moved gftp into GNOME CVS not long ago, so
gftp could take benefit of the GNOME development infrastructure like our
wonderfull i18n team. Welcome onboard Brian. 

        http://www.gftp.org/
       
http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=gftp

==============================================================
4. ZDnet looks at Evolution
--------------------------------------------------------------

ZDnet has an article talking about how Ximian Evolution helps makes
Linux an option on the corporate desktop due to its support for
Microsoft Exchange servers. Nice to see this sort of mainstream press
attention even if the article is not extremly interesting. 

        
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2878203,00.html

==============================================================
5. Abiword table support moving forward
--------------------------------------------------------------

Martin Sevior is continuing to work on getting good table support into
Abiword. He just released this screenshot showing the new table cell
merging functionality in action. Screenshot also displays the new Gtk2
frontend being developed for Abiword.  

        http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/mergeCells.png

==============================================================
6. GNOME 2 todo list.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Meeks updated his list of todo's for GNOME2. It is a small list
of tasks Michael thinks are suiteable for someone who wants to get
started working on GNOME. Please check it out and see if you find any
interesting tasks. 

        http://www.gnome.org/~michael/todo.html

==============================================================
7. Bugs getting fixed
--------------------------------------------------------------

The unyielding bug squishing action in GNOME CVS continues. Two
longstanding bugs had fixes checked into CVS recently. Michael Meeks
fixed the non-critical but anoying bug that has been causing the desktop
backround to get redrawn as Nautilus is started. A more critical bug
that is now fixed is support for menu editing in GNOME2. This means you
can now graphically edit your panel menu again and also when new
software are installed they show up immediately in the menu. A big
thanks to Alex Gravely of Ximian for getting menu editing working
properly. 


==============================================================
8. Gnumeric gets Pango groove
--------------------------------------------------------------

Jody Goldberg and the Gnumeric team made a new development release of
Gnumeric for GNOME 2. With this relase Gnumeric is now fully using Pango
which means you will be able to use things arabic and indic languages in
your spreadsheets. Lots of other nice additons too in this release. Full
release notes below. 

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-August/msg00080.html

==============================================================
9. Gtk# 0.4 is out
--------------------------------------------------------------

Mike Kestner made the 0.4 release of the C# bindings for GNOME this
week. The use and development of the bindings seems already to have
reached a very high level so we might get to see Gtk# based applications
start popping up in the not to distant future. Full announcement below. 

        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-August/msg00072.html

==============================================================
10. GNOME in Arabic moves forward
--------------------------------------------------------------

The support for Arabic in GNOME2 is moving forward rapidly. Thanks to
the great team at arabeyes.org large parts of GNOME2 has already been
translated as shown by the screenshot by Hicham Amaoui linked below.
Also a longstanding Pango bug relating to accelerators in Arabic has
finally gotten a patch so hopefully that issue will be resolved soon
too. Thanks to Roozbeh Pournader for making the patch. 

        http://amaoui.free.fr/gnome2/images/gnome2ar.png
        http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83058

==============================================================
12. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

This information is from http://bugzilla.gnome.org, which hosts bug and
feature reports for most of the Gnome modules. If you would like to join
the bug hunt, subscribe to the gnome-bugsquad mailing list.

Currently open: 7290 (In the last week: New: 619, Resolved: 889,
Difference: 
-270)

Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests): 

  nautilus: 786 (In the last week: New: 49, Resolved: 29, Difference:
+20)
  gtk+: 588 (In the last week: New: 12, Resolved: 6, Difference: +6)
  gnome-vfs: 286 (In the last week: New: 7, Resolved: 5, Difference: +2)
  GIMP: 284 (In the last week: New: 15, Resolved: 7, Difference: +8)
  galeon: 274 (In the last week: New: 83, Resolved: 73, Difference: +10)
  sawfish: 184 (In the last week: New: 3, Resolved: 3, Difference: 0)
  gnome-applets: 169 (In the last week: New: 24, Resolved: 21,
Difference: +3)
  gnome-panel: 161 (In the last week: New: 40, Resolved: 26, Difference:
+14)
  gnome-core: 129 (In the last week: New: 33, Resolved: 341, Difference:
-308)
  control-center: 121 (In the last week: New: 20, Resolved: 58,
Difference: -38)
  gnome-terminal: 97 (In the last week: New: 20, Resolved: 15,
Difference: +5)
  balsa: 96 (In the last week: New: 9, Resolved: 12, Difference: -3)
  medusa: 94 (In the last week: New: 0, Resolved: 2, Difference: -2)
  gnome-pilot: 85 (In the last week: New: 6, Resolved: 29, Difference:
-23)
  glib: 82 (In the last week: New: 3, Resolved: 2, Difference: +1)

Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs: 
  
  [email protected]: 372 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 114 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 57 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 37 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 25 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 12 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 12 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 12 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 11 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 11 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 10 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 10 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 10 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 9 bugs closed.
  [email protected]: 9 bugs closed.
  
==============================================================
11. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.


  Most active modules:
 15 gnome-pim
 7 totem
 7 mc
 5 gtk+
 5 gtkmm-root
 5 gnome-i18n
 5 gedit
 5 xmlsec
 4 sodipodi
 3 gimp
 3 metacity
 3 gnomemeeting
 3 galeon
 2 gnumeric
 2 gnome-games
 2 gnome-user-docs
 2 profterm
 2 dia
 2 libgda
 1 glib
[17 active modules omitted]


  Most active hackers:
 16 srittau
 10 dnloreto
 7 proskin
 6 bansz
 5 hadess
 5 murrayc
 5 paolo
 5 aleksey
 4 tml
 4 cneumair
 3 hp
 3 roozbeh
 2 rodrigo
 2 lclausen
 2 drake
 2 utx
 2 neo
 2 lauris
 2 chyla
 1 yaneti
[12 active hackers omitted]


==============================================================
13. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

gLabels  - creating labels and business cards.
Quick Lounge  - Quick Launch for GNOME 2
Totem  - Movie player based on the xine libraries
CVSGnome Build Script  - CVSGnome Build Script
screem  - Web Site Editor
XML Security Library  - Implementation of XML Security specs
Yelp  - Help browser for GNOME 2.0
GnuCash  - A personal finance manager
gcompressor  - gui for compression decompression tolls.
gedit  - Lightweight UTF-8 text editor
gtktalog  - Disk catalog tool
gdm  - GNOME Display Manager
gob  - GObject Builder
gnome-utils  - A collection of small applications
Gnome RIG  - A GUI for Hamlib
libelysium  - Set of utility functions
Emphetamine  - Download Manager for GNOME
gramps  - GNOME based genealogy program
Balsa  - Gnome Mail Client
Pan  - Usenet newsreader
Goats  - Sticky notes applet
gtkmm2  - GTK+ C++ binding

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/latest.php

Lots of nice things happening this week also thanks to our dedicated
team of developers, translators and others. John Hall pointed out during
GUADEC in Sevilla that we should be better at saying thank you to the
people behind the software, not just be good at sending them complaints
or requests. So if you come accross a nice GNOME application this week
that you really like, remember to send the author a small mail simply
saying; thanks. 

Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller 
[email protected]