I had forgotten to mail this out. My apologies.
This is the GNOME Summary for 2004-01-04 - 2004-01-10
==============================================================
Table of Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------
1. Goodbye Mark Finlay
2. Interview with Novell trio
3. GNOME-Turk has a party
4. ACME integrated into the Control Center
5. Exclusive Interview with Shaun McCance
6. GNOME 2.5.2 "You want me to blow on your toes?" released
7. The state of the GTK file selector
8. The GIMP - version 2.0pre1
9. Sodipodi SVG Flag Collection
10. iPod support for Rhythmbox
11. List-Admin Help Wanted
12. Translation Status
13. Hacker Activity
14. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
15. New and Updated Software
==============================================================
1. Goodbye Mark Finlay
--------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Finlay passed away this past Friday, 9th January 2004. Mark was a
enthusiastic contributor to GNOME. He has been a contributor to Rhythmbox,
GNOME usability, Gossip and a number of other projects. In addition he created
the GNOME Users Board. It's sad to see a young life cut short. All of us here
wish to give our heartfelt condolences to Mark's family and friends.
I hope this is the last time that I have to report on the passing away of
another member of the GNOME community. Here's hoping that 2004 gives us a fresh
and positive outlook for GNOME and it's community.
==============================================================
2. Interview with Novell trio
--------------------------------------------------------------
Always On has published an interesting three part interview with Novell's Nat
Friedman, Chris Stone, and CTO of Novell's Ximian Services group, Miguel de
Icaza.
The interview focuses on a few very interesting topics - the changes that are
taking place inside Novell, a probable solar eclipse ;-), and the
responsibility for open-source code.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=2066_0_1_0_C
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=2271_0_1_0_C
htTP://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=2303_0_1_0_C
==============================================================
3. GNOME-Turk has a party
--------------------------------------------------------------
Recently, a motivation party was held for the GNOME-Turk l10n team in order to
encourage more people to get involved with GNOME development and to promote
Free Software.
I18n/l10n is one of the strongest areas of GNOME, and it is great to see the
local teams working towards making GNOME even stronger. Hopefully we will see
more such l10n parties from other languages teams soon.
http://www.frontsite.com.tr/?p=news&id=i18nws01
==============================================================
4. ACME integrated into the Control Center
--------------------------------------------------------------
Bastien Nocera (Hadess) has finally integrated his multimedia keys application
(ACME) into the GNOME control center.
ACME is a great tool - especially for Laptops users (and those with those fancy
Internet/multimedia keyboards). Good to see it getting some polish. This
probably fixes bug #103124.
http://www.advogato.org/person/hadess/diary.html?start=308
==============================================================
5. Exclusive Interview with Shaun McCance
--------------------------------------------------------------
In an ongoing new feature for the GNOME Weekly Summary, here is this week's
exclusive interview of a GNOME developer. For all of you out there who
absolutely hate how slow the current Yelp is, or if you think there is a
general lack of good documentation for GNOME, this is the guy with the answers.
Needless to say, he does a thank-less job that is heavily criticised when it is
lacking, but barely noticed when things are good. Without further delay, we
bring to you what Shaun McCance has to say.
1) Please identify yourself and tell us anything that you think the GNOME
community should know about you.
I am Shaun McCance. I maintain the GNOME help browser, Yelp, and I'm the GNOME
Documentation Project's Fearless Leader. Most of my time is spent working on
the documentation infastructure needed by any modern desktop environment.
2) How are you involved in developing GNOME and how did you get started?
I've been a GNOME user somewhere on the order of forever now, and I've always
wanted to get involved. In March 2003, Mikael Hallendal sent out an email
asking for somebody to help with the DocBook conversions. So I took the bait,
and then somehow ended up maintaining Yelp and being the GDP Fearless Leader.
3) Why did you decide to maintain one of the most difficult branches of Gnome
development - namely documentation?
Well, let's make one thing clear. I don't actually maintain any of the
documentation. We have a lot of fine writers, and they're the ones that do the
hard work of writing and maintaining all of the documentation. We have an
awesome team, and I love working with them. What I do is rather vague. In fact,
I'm still not even sure what I do. In general, I try to be a strong public
figure for the GDP, answering emails and helping people along. I'm trying to
put together a new help infrastructure on freedesktop.org, and one of my goals
is that the system be conducive to writing good content management tools. I try
to do anything that makes it easier for people to write good documentation. As
for how I got the GDP Fearless Leader role, I'm the fourth person to have the
position since its inception. After GNOME 2.4 went out the door, our previous
leader, John Fleck, decided to step down. He had some other things he wanted to
pursue, and he just wanted to shed some responsibility.
4) You are currently working on a new documentation system via freedesktop.org
to create a set of standard docs between GNOME and the KDE project - can you
please describe more specifically some of your goals and current
accomplishments in this project?
This is exciting stuff, and I really hope we can make something happen in the
2.8 time-frame. The basic idea is that you need a way for help files to be
recognized and listed by the help system. If you have an intelligent and
extensible foundation, you can start to work in some really cool features on
top. GNOME currently uses ScrollKeeper for installing and locating help files.
ScrollKeeper had also set out to be a desktop-neutral solution, but it never
really got much headway on KDE. I think both desktops have come a long way in
the last few years, and people now have a better idea of what sort of obstacles
you'll encounter and how to get past them. We've really only had some
preliminary discussions, and there hasn't been much discussion in the last
couple of weeks. I've been very busy working on Yelp, so I hope to spark the
conversations back up after the feature freeze. It's too early to make any
promises, but I think we'll be able to pull together something really solid.
5) What is one thing about the current GNOME desktop that absolutely bugs you
and you want it changed as soon as possible? Likewise, what is one thing that
you absolutely love about the GNOME desktop?
What absolutely bugs me: It's not really the "desktop", but I'm saying it
anyway. We could really benefit from some high-level developer docs. The API
references are usually quite good, and they're invaluable to a programmer who
knows what he's doing. But you need stuff like Havoc Pennington's "GTK+/Gnome
Application Development" to help new developers learn the concepts of the
platform. This should really be a priority. But we can't very well expect all
of our maintainers to drop their work to write a book. Writing a book is a big
task, and we need to keep these guys hacking. Really, I think that we've
reached a point where there are people who are willing and able to do this kind
of work. I think if we had a strong initiative for this, the pieces would fall
into place. Of course, that's the sort of thing that I ought to be doing, and
I've already put together some plans for it. But, like many developers, I've
bitten off a bit more than I can chew. What I absolutely love: The new spatial
Nautilus. The captains rock.
6) Where do you see Yelp and the GNOME Documentation Project heading in the
near and not so near future?
I think the goal all along has been to get documentation to be thought of as a
core part of the platform. If you meet some developer at a conference and ask
her to put her application in the applications menu, in the same breath you
should tell her to put her documentation in the help system. A shared help
system with KDE helps a lot here, because ISVs are going to be more inclined to
do this if they don't have to jump through hoops for all of the different
desktop environments. I don't want to see the help system limited to just a few
application manuals. If your vendor ships some extra manuals, those should be
in the help system. If your digital camera comes with a CD (with, say HAL
device information files), then your camera's manual could be put into the help
system. The overarching idea here is that we want it to be as simple as
possible for users to find high-quality documentation for whatever they're
doing.
==============================================================
6. GNOME 2.5.2 "You want me to blow on your toes?" released
--------------------------------------------------------------
The release team has released version 2.5.2 (development branch) of GNOME. This
is a snapshot of development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is
primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes.
Great to see the GNOME releases running more or less according to schedule. A
number of modules have been proposed for GNOME 2.6, and a heated debate has
been going on at the desktop-devel lists about which modules to include, and
which to leave out.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-January/msg00260.html
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/modules/
==============================================================
7. The state of the GTK file selector
--------------------------------------------------------------
Eugenia Loli-Queru from OSNews recently posted a sugestion for the new UI of
the new GTK file-selector. This was in response to a mockup of the widget by
Tigert. Eric Woods suggested some improvements over the mockup at OSNews.
It is great to see serious work being done on the new file-selector. I have
been following GNOME HEAD, and the UI towards which Federico Mena-Quintero and
team are working seems to be quite good to me - it only needs some more polish.
And hopefully, this file-selector would support the .hidden file used by
Nautilus :-).
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5582
http://tigert.gimp.org/files/screenshots/filesel-tig2.png
http://www.gnomepro.com/gtk-file-sel2.png
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2004-01.html#09
==============================================================
8. The GIMP - version 2.0pre1
--------------------------------------------------------------
The first pre-release for the upcoming 2.0 version of The GIMP is now available
for download. It is fairly close to what version 2.0 final will be like -
though more testing is needed.
Please download this release and give it a spin - bug reports are much
appreciated. And if you try out this version, you probably won't want to go
back to the older stable version.
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.0/testing
http://scr.golem.de/?d=0310/gimp
==============================================================
9. Sodipodi SVG Flag Collection
--------------------------------------------------------------
The fourth release of the SVG flag collection is now available. The package,
licensed under the Creative Common Public Domain license, contains 300
regional, historical and organizational flags. These flags aren't easy to
design and a lot of work has gone into these flags. Please check them out.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-January/msg00032.html
==============================================================
10. iPod support for Rhythmbox
--------------------------------------------------------------
Rhythmbox development continues with an exciting new feature. Currently, work
is progressing on iPod support within Rhythmbox. However, the code has not yet
been checked into the mainline development tree. (waiting on gst metadata)
http://cfergeau.free.fr/rb-ipod.png
==============================================================
11. List-Admin Help Wanted
--------------------------------------------------------------
If you've always wanted to help GNOME but feel that you have no coding,
artistic, writing or translating skills, here's a way to help that would be
very much appreciated.
Just think - a few minutes a day and you can help the free flow of information.
All you need is a web browser with cookies, a mailbox which has no quota and a
determination now to fall behind. Please help out the current list admin. If
you want to something easy that won't take a lot of time please consider being
a list admin for gnome-user.
Please mail gnome-summary@xxxxxxxxx if you're interested.
==============================================================
12. Translation Status
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://stara.kvota.net/sri/stats26.php?end=2004-01-10&; start=2004-01-04
==============================================================
14. 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: 10485 (In the last week: New: 673, Resolved: 745, Difference:
-72)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
nautilus: 734 (In the last week: New: 61, Resolved: 49, Difference: +12)
gtk+: 638 (In the last week: New: 27, Resolved: 43, Difference: -16)
control-center: 255 (In the last week: New: 19, Resolved: 11, Difference: +8)
gnome-vfs: 246 (In the last week: New: 6, Resolved: 7, Difference: -1)
GnuCash: 222 (In the last week: New: 5, Resolved: 3, Difference: +2)
gnome-panel: 203 (In the last week: New: 32, Resolved: 33, Difference: -1)
gnome-applets: 158 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 25, Difference: +3)
galeon: 148 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 30, Difference: -2)
dia: 145 (In the last week: New: 14, Resolved: 21, Difference: -7)
GIMP: 141 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 34, Difference: -6)
epiphany: 122 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 24, Difference: +4)
balsa: 120 (In the last week: New: 7, Resolved: 0, Difference: +7)
sawfish: 119 (In the last week: New: 1, Resolved: 0, Difference: +1)
gnome-terminal: 119 (In the last week: New: 9, Resolved: 6, Difference: +3)
GStreamer: 102 (In the last week: New: 11, Resolved: 18, Difference: -7)
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
bolsh gimp org: 126 bugs closed.
hadess hadess net: 32 bugs closed.
quinet gamers org: 26 bugs closed.
vincent vuntz net: 25 bugs closed.
louie ximian com: 23 bugs closed.
poobar nycap rr com: 21 bugs closed.
federico ximian com: 17 bugs closed.
chpe+gnomebugz stud uni-saarland de: 16 bugs closed.
sven gimp org: 15 bugs closed.
kenneth gnu org: 15 bugs closed.
david davemalcolm demon co uk: 15 bugs closed.
martin wehner epost de: 14 bugs closed.
alexander winston comcast net: 14 bugs closed.
rbultje ronald bitfreak net: 14 bugs closed.
jfleck inkstain net: 14 bugs closed.
==============================================================
15. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------
Pigeon CD Recorder - A Gnome2 CD Recorder
General Applet Interface Library - Library simplifies applet development
Shermans aquarium - Swimming fish applet
OpenHacha - OpenHacha is a "free as in freedom" implementation for GNU/Linux
of the propietary-and-only-for-MS-Windows program Hacha.With OpenHacha you can
split huge files into small chunks and join the chunks then without problems
(like cat/split commands).
GnoCHM - A CHM file viewer
netspeed_applet - networkspeed monitor applet
Monster Masher - Monster mashing action game
Dlume - An easy to use address book.
PureAdmin - PureFTPd Graphical Manager
Conglomerate - User-friendly XML editor
Liferea - RSS/RDF news aggregator
CVSGnome Build Script - CVSGnome Build Script
XML Security Library - Implementation of XML Security specs
Silky - Silky - An easy to use SILC client.
gtk copy-paste buffer - gtk copy-paste buffer
gURLChecker - Graphic web links checker
GChemPaint - 2D chemical structures editor
gLabels - gLabels is a lightweight program for creating labels and business
cards for the GNOME desktop environment. It is designed to work with various
laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you``ll find at most
office supply stores.
For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map:
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/latest.php
==============================================================
13. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
115 evolution
93 gimp
68 epiphany
55 conglomerate
53 openoffice
51 gtk+
45 evolution-data-server
39 gnomeweb-wml
36 gdesklets
34 nautilus
33 gnumeric
32 balsa
31 rhythmbox
30 yelp
29 gnome-control-center
28 gnome-games
28 gnome-utils
24 webeyes
24 gnome-applets
23 gdm2
[160 active modules omitted]
Most active hackers:
67 danilo
57 mitr
51 rodrigo
44 michael
41 chpe
40 cneumair
37 arafatmedini
36 laurenti
34 dave_malcolm
32 adrighem
30 chrisime
28 jordim
28 serrador
26 cwryu
26 jpr
26 neo
25 walters
24 alexl
24 PeterB
23 hadess
[201 active hackers omitted]
Gnome Summary is brought to you by: Sri Ramkrishna, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Jim
Hodapp, and Andrew Coulam.
gnome-summary@xxxxxxxxx
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