Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 16:04:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Havoc Pennington <<a
href=”mailto:hp@redhat.com”>hp@redhat.com>
To: gnome-announce-list@gnome.org, gnome-list@gnome.org
This is the GNOME Summary for October 26 – November 9.
Table of Contents
1) Miguel Wins Award
2) MemProf
3) Report from Japan
4) gnome-db activity
5) developer.gnome.org Feature Articles
6) GStreamer
7) GNOME patch for AbiWord
8) Need New Pixmap Themes Person
9) Bug Buddy
10) Hacking Activity
11) New and Updated Software
1) Miguel Wins Award
Miguel was recognized along with Linus as one of the “100 most
remarkable innovators under 35” by Technology Review, a respected
magazine from MIT. See the link here:
http://www.techreview.com/tr100/profile.php3?deIcaza
2) MemProf
Owen released an exciting new development tool that should
interest all developers using the Linux kernel and the GNU C
library (2.0 or 2.1). Have a look here:
http://people.redhat.com/~otaylor/memprof/index.html
MemProf basically does conservative garbage collection to detect
memory leaks. It even has a nice GUI. For the moment, threads
confuse it a little bit, but it works great otherwise.
Commercial tools to do this cost on the order of $1000 per seat;
Owen wrote this in a couple weeks. Go figure.
I ran an early version of MemProf on GConf and found 6 serious
bugs in an hour or so. All of them would have been nearly
impossible to find without this tool.
Get MemProf; run it on all your applications, as often as
possible. Do it now.
3) Report from Japan
I went to Tokyo for a GNU Seminar last week, arranged by the
Free Software Foundation. The day after the seminar we held a GNOME
BOF as well. There were around 100 people at the seminar, 50 or so
at the BOF; lots of interest in GNU and GNOME.
Interesting demonstrations I saw included Masatake Yamato’s
Display GhostScript – which does some cool things – and Yutaka
Niibe’s port of the Linux kernel to Super 8 (a common embedded chip
used in Sega Dreamcast). I had a chance to meet some members of the
Japan GNOME User’s Group, Steve Baur of XEmacs fame, Masayuki Ida
(GNU VP for Japan), Manuel Chakravarty (GTK+-Haskell author),
Werner Koch (GPG author), and many others. Everyone was very nice
and very enthusiastic; I had a great time, a visit to Tokyo is
strongly recommended if you ever get a chance.
This is also the reason I missed the summary last week. 🙂
I put the slides for my GNOME presentation on the web, look
here:
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/havoc_slides.tar.gz
You need MagicPoint to view them, but they may be of interest.
Feel free to use/modify/redistribute these slides if you’re making
a presentation about GNOME.
4) gnome-db activity
There’s a new version of gnome-db (GNOME database
library/applications), and a new mailing list for discussion. If
you’re interested in databases check out this module and consider
subscribing to the list. You can read more here:
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-db/
5) developer.gnome.org Feature Articles
developer.gnome.org is running feature articles now, see:
http://developer.gnome.org/feature/
The first article is from Federico, on gdk-pixbuf. There are
also new gdk-pixbuf reference docs at:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gdk-pixbuf/book1.html
6) GStreamer
Erik Walthinsen revealed some interesting streaming media work,
have a look at the announcement here:
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/941434104/index_html
There’s lots of information on the home page:
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/gnome/gst/
He has an MP3 player in only a few lines of code…
7) GNOME patch for AbiWord
Joaquin Cuenca Abela has a patch for AbiWord to make it use the
GNOME libraries. See his post to the AbiWord mailing list:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/October/0288.html
No news on whether this has been integrated into the source
tree. GNOME compliance is welcome news; it could give AbiWord
consistent-looking dialogs and session management, among other
things.
8) Need New Pixmap Themes Person
Richard Hestilow (hestgray@ionet.net) mailed to ask
for help on revamping the pixmap theme:
The pressing needs of school are pretty much requring
me to go on a “coding vacation”. So! I need someone to bring themes
back from the brink of death. I looked over my code, and
apparently, the only code that I’m not embarassed to hand over
consists of a header file and some lame gradient implementations.
But I assure you I spent a lot of time on that header file :-). All
of this plus a bit of work on a themes editor is in cvs module
“rcedit”. In summary: I want someone to take over this stuff while
I’m gone. Thank you very much.PS: Chances are good I will not be replying to email on a
regular basis.
The pixmap theme needs to be rewritten to use gdk-pixbuf; it can
also be made a good bit faster by reducing redraws, I’m told. Mail
Richard if you want to work on this.
9) Bug Buddy
Jacob Berkman hacked up a bug report wizard. This is pretty
cute; it walks the user through the process of submitting a bug
report. If there’s a core file, it will even automatically extract
a backtrace; and it adds itself as the MIME handler for core files
in the file manager. (Of course, the backtrace is only useful if
the program in question has debugging symbols, but it will at least
sometimes work.)
Bug Buddy is designed to work with multiple bug trackers; right
now it only supports bugs.gnome.org, but should be trivial to get
working with other Debian-based trackers (such as bugs.debian.org)
and probably isn’t hard to get working with Bugzilla systems.
Members of projects other than GNOME might want to look into
this.
10) Hacking Activity
1,363 commits in two weeks.
Module Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per module, during
this week)
107 gdk-pixbuf
98 entity
97 gnumeric
85 gnome-core
66 gimp
51 crescendo
50 gnome-libs
49 bug-buddy
45 gxsnmp
44 gtk–
35 gnome-debug
34 gnome-applets
27 gtkhtml
26 gphoto
26 gnome-pilot
25 web-devel-2
22 gnomeweb-wml
22 beast
20 dr-genius
19 nethack
19 glade–
18 mc
User Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per user, during this
week)
86 sopwith
66 unammx
65 jirka
64 jberkman
60 martin
60 jody
59 imain
39 mwimer
39 jrb
34 ole
34 mmeeks
32 wlashell
30 gregm
28 timj
24 kmaraas
24 glaurent
23 hp
22 drmike
22 dcm
20 kenelson
20 eskil
The beginnings of a graphics/plot component went in to Gnumeric,
and the evolution module contains code for the much-discussed
Evolution email client International GNOME Support is working on.
Lots of work on gdk-pixbuf and the next version of gnome-libs, as
well as the next gnome-core.
11) New and Updated Software
Something like 40 new/updated applications…
gmt – GUI for kernel module management
Gnonews – news reader
gnomeching – I Ching
Gnomba – Samba browser
Vget – network download tool
gbox_applet – mailbox watcher
sawmill – nice window manager for GNOME
bug-buddy – bug report wizard
Gnetutil – ping, traceroute, etc. GUI
gnome-ttt – Tic Tac Toe
gnome-chess – Chess GUI
elknews – newsreader
GProc – process list
yank – notes and TODO list
irssi – IRC client
GtkExText – enhanced text widget
GMiniCPPEnvironment – sort of a micro-IDE for C++
GPeriodic – periodic table
GMasqDialer – masqdialer client
gnome-ttt-3D – 3D tic-tac-toe
GnOpenGL3ds – OpenGL 3DS file viewer
graphtool – BMP graphs from Gnumeric files
Pygmy – mail client written in Python
GMatH – math environment
Gnome Toaster – CD creation suite
gnome-db – GNOME database access
pasmon – network monitor
Pan – GNOME/GTK newsreader
Gmail – mail client
GStreamer – multimedia library
teatime – tells you about teatime
Gnorponocal – RPN calculator with a really weird name
screem – Web site creator/editor
gEdit – text editor
Gseq – sequencer
Morpheus – 3D model viewer
GCO – GNOME Comics Organizer
LinPopUp – talks to WinPopUp over Samba
GnomeHack – Nethack port
Gnome Network Buddy – network utility program
think – makes outlines
Quest – role-playing game
MemProf – memory profiler
Tapelab – tape labels
PicView – image viewer
ggv – postscript viewer
gimon – ISDN monitor
Eye of GNOME – image viewer
QuickRes applet – switch video resolutions
Tim – web browser (ambitious!)
graham – organizes important documents for you
See the software map on http://www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for
more information about any of these packages.
Until next week –
Havoc
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