A recent study found that 44% of American Internet users have published content online somehow. Interestingly, most of the content was in the form of photographs. Edd Dumbill takes a look at one of GNOME's most promising photo management programs - F-Spot. F-Spot was started by the late Ettore Perazzoli and is now being maintained by Larry Ewing, and a 0.1 release seems to be imminent. F-Spot is based on the idea of filtering one's collection by meaningful tags: people, places, events and so on. Tag assignment will be done by drag and drop. Import and export filters will allow one to get photos from the camera and then sling them up to something like the online photo management gallery.
In his blog entry, Edd speaks about integrating F-Spot with the rest of the desktop through applications like the Evolution Data Server, and has plans to extend F-Spot with the help of FOAF depiction data.
http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/2004/3/1#23:50
A recent announcement at Footnotes tells us that a site has been created for GNOME users and developers in China. Great to see GNOME getting ready for those millions of Chinese computer users out there - keep on rockin!
XAML is the primary way to create a UI in the "Longhorn" programming model, and Edd Dumbill takes a look at it. He comments on the various possible alternatives that can be used for GNOME to get similar functionality and ease of use as XAML, and covers XForms, XUL, the XML generated by Glade, and the usual HTML, SVG, XML, CSS combo.
Miguel De Icaza suggests two ways to handle this issue, either by adopting the Nat Friedman method of building a matching system in the meantime: leveraging GNOME's existing technologies, or by implementing the Avalon/XAML API.
http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/2004/3/3#11:21
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Mar-03.html
The GNOME 2.6 release team has released the first BETA of what will be GNOME 2.6. Once again, here's your chance to test to out GNOME 2.6 and file any bugs before we hit our final release. Please note, that as of now we are at hard freeze for GNOME 2.6 and will not accept any changes with the exception of critical bug fixes.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-March/msg00027.html
Congratulations to Damien Sandras and all of the contributors to the GnomeMeeting project who reached their 1.0 milestone. Damien and others lost much sleep trying to fix issues and bugs and making sure it's stable. It's been a long time coming, Damien. Kudos to all of you for your hard work.
The major enhancements are a speed dial sub menu, much more usable address book, and preferences being completely re-done. In short, there have been many additions that Damien has added to the applications that are too many to list.
GnomeMeeting is a H.323 compatible videoconferencing application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with H.323 hardware or software (such as Microsoft NetMeeting).
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-March/msg00007.html
The last development release of GTK+ has been released. This is the chance for GTK+ enthusiasts to really file bug reports and help make a polished release. The main thing in this release is of continuing churn to the GTK file chooser widget, and some extra API changes. Also some support for determining what direction bidi (bidirectional) text takes when editing.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-March/msg00010.html
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.3/
This Monday is hard code freeze. This means that after a component releases it's BETA 1 tarballs; only critical bugs will be fixed. The reason we have hard code freeze is so that we get stability and not be tempted to put in last minute changes. It's also a great time for translators and documenters to continue doing their roles without worrying that components will add new features or changes that require them to change things around. This is part of a disciplined process in making sure that we come out with a great stable release while sticking to a schedule.
During this phase, no changes will be allowed to the source code without approval from the release team. It lasts until 2.6.0 is released and then we go back into bug fixing mode. Currently, that is scheduled for March 22nd. Maintainers that have to break the freeze are encouraged to mail the release team. (see links below)
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-March/msg00084.html
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/tasks.html#ApprovingFreezeBreaks
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/
With GNOME 2.6 coming soon, the release team is looking for some groovy screen shots to show off some of the great work that GNOME hackers have been working on for the past 6 months. If you have some great screen shots, please show them off! Please send mail to Andrew Sobola (aes@gnome.org) with your png formatted screen shots!
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-March/msg00017.html
Luis sends out mail this week in a plea to give some compassionate rear kicking to 2.5 bugs. There are a number of showstopper bugs and bugs that need love on various bits of the GNOME 2.6 release modules. Please help Luis with some grim reaper type love and get those bugs out of there. We're looking forward to seeing all of you on Thursday's Bug day.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2004-March/msg00005.html
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
| Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 10600 (In the last week: New: 740, Resolved: 630, Difference: +110)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 703 | 67 | 48 | +19 |
| gtk+: | 584 | 89 | 71 | +18 |
| control-center: | 261 | 27 | 24 | +3 |
| gnome-vfs: | 257 | 9 | 9 | 0 |
| GnuCash: | 223 | 4 | 5 | -1 |
| gnome-panel: | 212 | 35 | 27 | +8 |
| gnome-applets: | 155 | 17 | 16 | +1 |
| doxygen: | 145 | 13 | 0 | +13 |
| galeon: | 140 | 19 | 24 | -5 |
| GStreamer: | 136 | 23 | 26 | -3 |
| balsa: | 124 | 7 | 2 | +5 |
| sawfish: | 123 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| rhythmbox: | 116 | 22 | 11 | +11 |
| Gnumeric: | 112 | 12 | 9 | +3 |
| dia: | 111 | 7 | 17 | -10 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| otaylor redhat com: | 36 |
| hadess hadess net: | 31 |
| maclas gmx de: | 22 |
| gnome flowerday cx: | 22 |
| chpe+gnomebugz stud uni-saarland de: | 19 |
| poobar nycap rr com: | 19 |
| alexl redhat com: | 19 |
| marco gnome org: | 19 |
| lrclause uiuc edu: | 16 |
| ds schleef org: | 15 |
| jody gnome org: | 14 |
| vincent vuntz net: | 13 |
| mark skynet ie: | 13 |
| Uraeus linuxrising org: | 12 |
| bill haneman sun com: | 12 |
Gnome Summary is brought to you by: Sri Ramkrishna, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Jim Hodapp, and Andrew Coulam.
To submit news items, send mail to gnome-summary@gnome.org
Join the Friends of GNOME! http://www.gnome.org/friends