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Table of Contents
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- Awards and Recognition
- New RPMs
- Web Banners and Buttons
- New File Manager Release
- Desk Guide
- GtkWrapBox
- Patches and Bugs to bugs.gnome.org
- Call for documentation
- Hacking activity
- New and Updated Software
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1) Awards and Recognition
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Gnome received two honors this week. First, we got a DaveCentral
“Best of Linux” award:
http://linux.davecentral.com/bol_19990513.html
And we got an “Editor’s Choice” nod from CNet:
http://home.cnet.com/category/0-3721-7-290064.html?st.cn.linuxdl.txt.rev5
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2) New RPMs
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Dr Mike announced some more RPM updates, and says that updates
will continue to appear in this directory:
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/RHAD
These are for Red Hat 6.0.
Also, Dax Kelson’s RPMs are here:
ftp://ftp.inconnect.com/pub/unix/linux/redhat-6.0/contrib-updates/
I’m not sure what the difference is though. 🙂
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3) Web Banners and Buttons
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Check out:
Ville P?tsi (drc) created these for you to use in your GNOME
promotion efforts. They’re cool. I already have a button on my web
site. 🙂
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4) New File Manager Release
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Here’s Miguel’s summary of new features:
- Samba File System support.
Wayne Roberts contributed the SMBfs virtual file system to the
file manager, to use it just use the special path name “/#smb:”,
like this:
“/#smb:thehost”.It still needs username encoding, password encoding and that
sort of thing, so if you want to help out in this area, contact
Wayne - Many new localizations and updated localizations
- Kjartan provided some GNOME documentation for the file
manager. - GMC now loads pathnames specified on the command line.
- Federico dropped some dead code from the code.
- Viewer should paint colors correctly now.
- Federico’s changes to add the proper WMclass names to the
desktop windows; He also did some updates to the desktop handling
code. - Starting terminals from the desktop starts them from the Home
directory for the user, not the desktop directory. - Japaneese support by Akira.
- Many compilation fixes, and many runtime fixes. You need to try
this out. - Updated documentation on the desktop.links startup option.
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5) Desk Guide
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Tim Janik wrote a new pager applet for us, called Desk Guide.
It’s smaller and faster than the old pager. You can get it from CVS
gnome-core, and presumably it will be in the next release of
gnome-core.
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6) GtkWrapBox
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Tim Janik wanted to announce a new widget to appear in Gtk+ 1.4;
GtkWrapBox is like GtkBox, except that it “wraps” the child widgets
to the next row or column if the size allocation it receives is not
large enough. For now these are in GLE but they’ll be in the devel
branch of Gtk+ soon.
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7) Patches and Bugs to bugs.gnome.org
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People frequently send me patches and bug reports by private
email; I assume they also send them to other Gnome maintainers.
Lots of bug reports end up on gnome-list as well.
It’s good to send these things to package maintainers or discuss
them on the list; but it’s even better if you also submit them to
bugs.gnome.org. We get a *lot* of email; for example, I must get
well over a thousand messages a day. Only 20 or 30 of those are
private messages to me, but nonetheless it builds up. I can easily
lose track of any email that I don’t handle immediately in my inbox
(which has around 1500 old messages in it that I need to go
through).
The advantage of bugs.gnome.org is that it archives the patch or
bug report so we don’t lose it or forget about it. And there’s much
to be said for that.
So, if you’ve sent me or any other maintainer a patch, and
you’re wondering where it went, or if you have a pet bug that isn’t
getting fixed, please, please send it to bugs.gnome.org. Most
likely it’s simply gotten buried in our giant pile of electronic
clutter.
It’s true that there’s a backlog on bugs.gnome.org as well, and
you may not get an immediate response, but you will at least know
that the report won’t get lost.
As mentioned last week, it’s also helpful if you can nudge us to
close reports if you notice a reported bug has been fixed.
For instructions on submitting a report, scroll down a bit on
the main bugs.gnome.org page and you’ll see a link. The short
version: add two magic lines at the top of your email body,
Package: whatever
Version: whatever
Then type in your report and mail to submit@bugs.gnome.org.
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8) Call for documentation
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Miguel sent mail to gnome-devel-list (not yet in the web
archives, so no link) urging us to work on documentation more. Here
are the four “action points” he listed:
- We need to finish the entire documentation of the GNOME
libraries, this means: adding in-source API documentation to all
public entry points and filling in the blanks of the appropiate
“template” file. - We need people to provide example code for all the API calls.
Having the pure API call sometimes is not enough. Please, do help
us by writing short examples that we can include. - Review the existing documentation and make sure it looks good,
it covers the topics it should cover, contains good english,
contains good examples and is clear to follow. - Help us distributing the help: making sure the proper files are
installed in the proper locations on the system, that the Makefiles
are sane and so on.
Please consider contributing to Gnome in this area.
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9) Hacking activity
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Since we haven’t introduced it in a while, remember that CVS
Module Score-O-Matic is:
awk ‘/^Subject: GNOME CVS: / {print $4}’ mail/gnome-commits-last
| sort | uniq -c | sort -r -k 1 > output
and CVS User Score-O-Matic:
awk ‘/^Subject: GNOME CVS: / {print $5}’ mail/gnome-commits-last
| sort | uniq -c | sort -r -k 1 > output
Results for this week:
Modules:
31 gnumeric 29 web-devel-2 24 gimp 23 gnomeicu 22 mc 21 gphoto 14 libsigc++ 12 photon 11 gmf 11 gill
Users:
53 gnomecvs 27 unammx 19 kenelson 18 tml 18 jwise 16 kmaraas 12 martijn 10 sopwith 10 dcm 8 scottf 8 bertrand 7 vinc 7 spapadim
Unfortunately the CVS commit scripts were busted for a while so
everyone was listed as “gnomecvs” for a bit, hosing our user
results. Sigh.
Matt Wilson installed a new version of Bonsai:
It lets you do things such as “Revert all changes made by unammx
since the beginning of time.” 🙂 It also has useful features, we
promise.
All the usual suspects were still very active: translation team,
Gnumeric, core Gnome stuff and Gtk.
Christof did some Glade– work (to generate Gtk– code from
Glade instead of C code).
Miguel checked in a bunch of docs to gnome-libs, setting an
example for everyone else to follow.
Jeremy Wise was hacking madly on GnomeICU.
Justin Maurer (also of Slashdot and Debian fame) is making good
progress on his gradebook application.
“gnoghurt” the video filters demo went into CVS.
Raph has been fixing and optimizing all sorts of libart stuff
now that he’s actually using it for Gill. Looking good, looking
good.
Elliot’s continuing on GMF development.
Mark Crichton is hacking the gdk-pixbuf module; this is a
smaller and simpler image-loading library in the tradition of
Imlib.
No huge CVS events, but plenty of good solid progress.
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10) New and Updated Software
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GNU xhippo
gphoto
Trinity
Mahogany
gtkdiff
Gaim
Gnome Toaster
PovFront
gEdit
GnomeICU
GFile
gsysinfo
GDict
Gnome-Lines
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OK, can’t think of anything else. Until next week –
Havoc