This is the GNOME Summary for July 21 – August 28, 2000.
Table of Contents
1) GNOME Foundation Announcement 2) Mozilla goes GPL 3) GNOME 1.4 Release Coordination 4) Bug tracking 5) Sun hackers wandering around in need of guidance 6) Indic support for Pango 7) BEAST webmaster sought 8) GConf mailing list 9) Key navigation 10) Guppi is cool 11) embedded equation component manifesto 12) Nautilus preview release 13) Evolution preview release 14) Keith Packard doing cool X extensions 15) iPAQ runs GTK+ apps 16) Havoc actually writes GNOME summary! 17) Hacking Activity 18) New and Updated Software
1) GNOME Foundation Announcement
In case you live under a rock, we announced lots of big news at
LinuxWorld. What this amounts to: we are creating a foundation to
help get GNOME organized; the foundation is simply all the GNOME
contributors getting together and electing a smaller group to be in
charge of keeping things semi-coherent. Lots of companies also
announced their support of GNOME; they’ll join an “advisory board”
which is a part of the foundation but doesn’t make decisions for
GNOME. Note to press: this is not an industry consortium, the
membership consists of individual contributors, not companies.
Press releases are here:
http://www.gnome.org/pressreleases.html
An archive of the press conference audio webcast is
available:
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/966444901/index_html
Miguel did a good job of emphasizing the community nature of the
GNOME project, and conveying the exciting nature of the
announcement.
Sun posted an extensive feature about GNOME and this
announcement on the main page of http://www.sun.com; it’s no longer
on the main page, but you can read it here:
We got press coverage in just about every periodical imaginable,
starting with the New York Times who got the scoop in advance. A
summary of some of the press is here:
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/966859256/index_html
As a bonus, that URL has a lengthy inane flamewar. 😉 See
Slashdot for a couple more uninformed flamewars.
We have a FAQ about the foundation in the works, watch for it on
the GNOME web site.
The real meaning of this announcement, in my mind, is that a
complete, 100% open source office desktop is suddenly a much
nearer-term prospect. Volunteers still make up the majority of
GNOME contributors, but the influx of engineers and code from Sun
will make a big difference in the office suite area.
2) Mozilla goes GPL
Mozilla announced that they will be dual-licensing their code
under the GPL, which means, among other things, that we can now
link GNOME code to Mozilla. Nautilus already embeds Mozilla for
full-featured web browsing. For people who prefer super-small to
full-featured, Nautilus also offers a GtkHTML component.
There’s an article about this here:
http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=155
3) GNOME 1.4 Release Coordination
Maciej and Jacob are coordinating the GNOME 1.4 release. There’s
also a mailing list for people who are involved (for example, if
you’re maintaining a package that will be in the release).
See their announcement:
http://mail.gnome.org/pipermail/gnome-devel-list/2000-August/007471.html
4) Bug tracking
http://bugs.gnome.org has
been a little bit flaky lately. But it’s back alive, we think. So
keep sending those bugs. We have a plan to move to Bugzilla soon,
but need to keep limping on bugs.gnome.org for a bit.
5) Sun hackers wandering around in need of guidance
There seem to be a number of Sun people on the mailing lists
that need people to give them tasks, or just need friendly guides
around the GNOME universe. Feel free to help them out.
6) Indic support for Pango
Robert Brady has done Pango support for Indic languages, and is
looking for native speakers to try it out:
http://www.wholehog.fsnet.co.uk/robert/indic/
7) BEAST webmaster sought
Tim Janik is looking for someone to maintain http://beast.gtk.org – send mail to
[email protected] if you’re interested.
8) GConf mailing list
GConf has a mailing list now, since more hackers are getting
involved in development. See here:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gconf-list
I recently updated the TODO in CVS in response to some
interesting discussion on the list about future directions.
9) Key navigation
People have expressed interest in going through GNOME and
enhancing keyboard navigation. There are a number of ways we could
help improve key navigation:
- Work on a document describing standard accelerators, possibly
for www.freedesktop.org in cooperation with other desktop
groups - Work on a document (or section of the GTK docs) that describes
all the issues in keyboard support. This should include all aspects
of key navigation, not just accelerators. For example, I think it’s
currently undocumented how to save user customizations of
accelerators, and currently undocumented how to underline a letter
in the label accompanying a GtkEntry and have Alt+letter move the
focus to that entry. Other issues include setting the default
dialog button, etc. - Make sure any needed enhancements to GTK+ itself get into GTK+
as soon as possible; this makes the previous documentation item
extra-important - Write a small sample app that’s fully keyboard-navigable
- Actually go through and make changes in GNOME apps
I think the documentation is more important than making the code
changes. The lack of key navigation is almost certainly because it
isn’t properly documented, and therefore there aren’t any examples
to follow. Hopefully someone can do this _soon_.
10) Guppi is cool
There’s a new Guppi snapshot release, showing plot support
slated for inclusion in Gnumeric. Guppi is very impressive now –
third rewrite was the charm. 😉 It’s also something like 40,000
lines of code, a huge effort. There’s a lot of meat to this, we
aren’t talking about a screenshot generator.
http://mail.gnome.org/pipermail/guppi-list/2000-August/000408.html
11) embedded equation component manifesto
This post has a cool title (and is interesting, if you’re into
document embedding):
http://mail.gnome.org/pipermail/gnome-components-list/2000-August/001601.html
12) Nautilus preview release
Eazel put up a preview release of Nautilus: http://download.eazel.com/
13) Evolution preview release
And Helix has an Evolution preview:
http://www.helixcode.com/apps/evolution-preview/index.php3
14) Keith Packard doing cool X extensions
If you haven’t seen it yet, Keith is hacking XFree86 to support
vector graphics and translucent windows; check out some of his
talks here:
http://xfree86.org/~keithp/talks/
And a nifty shot of twm competing with Enlightenment:
http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/translucent.png
So, sooner or later we’ll have some pretty nice graphics on the
X desktop.
15) iPAQ runs GTK+ apps
At LinuxWorld, Jim Gettys had GTK+ up and running on the iPAQ
handheld; it was pretty neat. I can’t find a screenshot link with
GTK apps (but it looks like a regular X desktop, only
smaller…)
Plain X (no GTK) screenshots are here, you’ve probably seen
them:
http://www.handhelds.org/Compaq/iPAQH3600/Pictures/index.html
16) Havoc actually writes GNOME summary!
Owen suggested this item. 😉
17) Hacking Activity
Module Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per module, since the last summary) 732 evolution 590 nautilus 219 gimp 171 gnome-foundation 152 pan 147 gnome-i18n 138 gnome-libs 120 gtkhtml 112 gnome-vfs 112 balsa 107 web-devel-2 98 gimp-help 98 bonobo 97 gnome-db 95 gnome-admin-tools 92 gnumeric 90 gnome-applets 89 gtk+ 83 guppi3 82 gnome-print 81 gphoto2 79 mc 78 control-center 67 gtranslator 66 gnome-core 63 dia 62 medusa 52 ammonite User Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per user, since the last summary) 193 kmaraas 189 frob 153 kail 144 kabalak 132 rasta 122 peterw 121 clahey 114 martin 104 danw 95 hansp 94 charles 89 rodrigo 87 fejj 86 sullivan 85 egger 84 jirka 82 scottf 82 minmax 82 ettore 77 pablo 77 jody 76 dmueth 72 gzr 72 chema 68 bratislav 68 andy 67 mmeeks 64 darin 63 proskin 62 neo 61 rslomkow 60 rodo 60 federico 60 bansz 59 jpr 58 mstachow 57 tml 56 ramiro 53 trow 52 hovinen 48 rebecka 48 mathieu 47 sopwith 46 mfleming
18) New and Updated Software
Software since the last summary.
[elided due to huge time since last summary 🙂 ]
See the software map on www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for more
information about any of these packages.
Until next time –
Havoc
gnome-announce-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-announce-list