Date: 18 Jan 2000 18:56:36 -0500
From: Havoc Pennington hp@redhat.com
To: gnome-list@gnome.org, gnome-announce-list@gnome.org
This is the GNOME Summary for January 12-18, 2000.
Table of Contents
1) Projects of the Week
2) Loki job opportunity
3) Web site content authors needed
4) Vector illustrators galore
5) BEAST/BSE release
6) Guppi reviving; testers needed
7) Evolution update
8) Hacking Activity
9) New and Updated Software
1) Projects of the Week
In a major ripoff of an AbiSource invention:
http://www.abisource.com/pow.phtml
I’ve decided to do a “Project of the Week.” This is a small
project, maybe something that would take a day or a weekend, that
it would be cool to have someone working on. Sort of suggestions
for hacking or documenting. I’ll do this every week except weeks
when I can’t think of anything; if you think of good POWs then send
them in for inclusion.
I think we should have prizes for doing a POW but I can’t think
of any, so we’ll mention you in the summary or something. 😉
If you want to work on a POW, just go for it, and when you have
something working mail gnome-devel-list and let everyone know!
So, two initial projects.
PROJECT OF THE WEEK NUMBER ONE
Sawmill uses Lisp function names to display actions to the user,
in the key/mouse binding editor and in the tooltips. The project is
to display nice friendly function names instead. For example
instead of “popup-window-menu” show “Window operations menu” or
something.
I figure John Harper could do this in about 5 minutes but for
anyone else it would probably take a while getting familiar with
the Sawmill code. If you’re interested in Sawmill hacking maybe
it’s a nice way to get started.
I didn’t ask John about this but I assume he’d take the
patch.
PROJECT OF THE WEEK NUMBER TWO
Submitted by Jonathan at the Labs, this one is a much bigger
job, for documentation writers: GNOME System Administrator
Guide
This could start out pretty small with just a few pages, and
grow over time. But someone really needs to get the initial DocBook
and some content in CVS.
The idea is to document the administration of a GNOME
installation, such as in a computer lab. How do you set up the
panel, gdm, etc.? Where are the various config files (MIME types,
etc.)? How do you do TCP wrappers for ORBit?
Someone with experience doing this would obviously be the best
author of course.
2) Loki job opportunity
Loki (they port Linux games, such as Quake 3, as you surely
know) typically uses GTK and Glade to port level editors and other
Windows GUI stuff. They’re looking to hire a GTK hacker; sounds
like a pretty cool job. Have a look at this announce:
http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gtk-list/2000-January/0129.shtml
If you’re interested mail Michael Vance as it says in the
announce.
3) Web site content authors needed
We have a new web site framework in CVS, thanks to Joakim
Ziegler at Simplemente (www.simplemente.net). This will hopefully
finally kill the existing www.gnome.org pages. However, the
framework needs content written and/or “ported” from the old
website. If you’re interested, check ‘gnomeweb-wml’ out from CVS,
look at the navigation tree, and prepare some content to go at one
of the nodes.
You’ll need WML to build the site, read the README.
4) Vector illustrators galore
A while back I mentioned Sketch, the vector graphics program
written in Python/Tkinter and now being ported to GTK. There’s also
Sodipodi now, which uses the antialised GnomeCanvas and looks
pretty nice; check out these screenshots:
http://www.ariman.ee/linux/sodipodi/screenshots.html
So there are at least two promising entries in this field
(there’s also Gill, but it is on a much longer timescale).
Of course we have Dia too for higher-level diagrams rather than
illustration.
5) BEAST/BSE release
Tim put out a new version of BEAST and BSE; look here:
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/947866363/index_html
This is a synthesizer application.
6) Guppi reviving; testers needed
Jon Trowbridge has brought Guppi back from the dead in the new
C++-free ‘guppi3’ CVS module and is looking at making an alpha
release soon. He’s looking for people to test the code out before
the release, especially on non-x86 platforms. If you check guppi3
out of CVS and find problems, mail trow@emccta.com.
The Guppi website is newly-up-to-date:
http://www.gnome.org/guppi/
If you gave up on Guppi back when I was working on it, have
another look; I think Jon’s moving it along quite a bit faster than
I was and the results are pretty cool. Also the project has a
better motto than before.
7) Evolution update
The Helix hackers wrote in with some status updates on
Evolution.
Ettore has been working on GtkHTML; the internal structure of
the widget has been rearranged to make it easier to implement user
HTML editing and reduce memory usage. Also, GtkHTML finally accepts
data _before_ the widget is realized, a useful feature. Some simple
editing works already, you can get a cursor and type in text.
Miguel reports that the “shell” written in Python that
coordinates all the Evolution components has been started, but
doesn’t do so much yet.
Bertrand is almost done with the mbox backend, and will be
moving on to a MIME parser.
Chris is doing some Glade work for the contact editor; of course
Helix is taking advantage of GNOME’s Glade technology.
Nat is working on Wombat, the contact manager server. Wombat “is
a fully asynchronous corba-based API which can support loading
contacts off the local disk or a remote server.” The infrastructure
is done and Nat is in debugging mode.
Federico writes in to say: “I am writing the personal calendar
server (PCS), codenamed Tlacuache. It is similar to Nat Friedman’s
personal addressbook server (PAS), codenamed Wombat.” I complained
on #gnome that “Tlacuache” is the most unpronounceable, unspellable
thing ever and Miguel says: “Guajolote seems better.” “Guajolote”
doesn’t seem that much better to me. 🙂 Anyway this is not a
user-visible name.
The calendar/addressbook servers will be pretty cool; I assume
they are similar to “gconfd”, per-user daemons that manage your
personal information.
Here’s Federico’s description of Tlacuache:
1. It provides storage for calendars, internally using
gnome-vfs and possibly other backends in the future.2. It provides the standard mutation functions for a calendar on
a by-object basis: add an event, delete an event, update an
existing event.3. It provides semantic query functions: give me all the events
that occur in a specified range of time, including instances of
recurrences.4. It provides a notification interface so that multiple clients
can access a calendar at the same time: an object was added, an
object was removed, an object has changed.Everything is a Bonobo object with a CORBA interface.
When this is finished, likely tomorrow, I will modify Gnomecal
to use it as its main storage and event generation engine. Thus
Tlacuache will act as a data model and recurrence/alarm engine, and
Gnomecal will act as a simple view/controller.
Between Evolution, gconfd, OAF, etc. it looks like GNOME is
rapidly becoming a giant swarm of CORBA servers (which I think was
the original GNOME plan, over 2 years ago; we didn’t know how much
infrastructure we needed!).
8) Hacking Activity
Module Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per module, since
the last summary)
85 gnumeric
68 gimp
47 guppi3
45 libgtop
42 gnome-libs
35 gnomeicu
28 nautilus
27 evolution
27 beast
19 galway
18 gnome-core
16 gnome-guile
16 gb
15 gnome-db
15 gconf
14 gtkhtml
14 gnome-pilot
13 gtk–
11 gnomeweb-wml
10 gnome-vfs
User Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per user, since the
last summary)
56 martin
47 trow
45 arios
27 timj
26 jwise
26 hp
25 unammx
23 jirka
20 rasta
20 jpekka
18 jody
18 darin
17 mortenw
16 campd
15 rodrigo
15 cactus
14 ettore
13 sopwith
13 monniaux
11 utx
11 neo
11 kmaraas
11 jfell
11 eskil
11 ahyden
9) New and Updated Software
GId3toHtml – generate HTML listing your MP3’s
Oregano – cool circuit designer/simulator
Sodipodi – Vector illustration program
solfege – ear training
irssi – IRC client
Seahorse – GPG frontend
seti_applet – monitor your SETI@Home client
lua-gnome – bindings for the lua programming language
GtkExText – replacement text widget for GTK+
CD Changer Applet – applet to deal with CD eject/mount/etc.
gdxr2 – frontend for dvdplay
Pygmy – mail client written in Python
Gnetutil – GUI for ping, traceroute, etc.
CSCMail – another mail client, in Perl
VDKBuilder – C++ RAD tool
VDK – C++ wrapper for GTK+/GNOME
GNet – simple networking library in glib style
Finder – Mac-style finder bar
gnome-ttt-[3D] – tic tac toe, 3D and non-3D versions
gmt – module management GUI
Cloned Xunzip – file decompressor
gatO- interface to the “at” command
GnomeICU – ICQ client
See the software map on www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for more
information about any of these packages.
Until next week –
Havoc