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.
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
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
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
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.
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/
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
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
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
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
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@gnome.org if you're interested.
http://stara.kvota.net/sri/stats26.php?end=2004-01-10& start=2004-01-04
Currently open: 10485 (In the last week: New: 673, Resolved: 745, Difference: -72)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 734 | 61 | 49 | +12 |
| gtk+: | 638 | 27 | 43 | -16 |
| control-center: | 255 | 19 | 11 | +8 |
| gnome-vfs: | 246 | 6 | 7 | -1 |
| GnuCash: | 222 | 5 | 3 | +2 |
| gnome-panel: | 203 | 32 | 33 | -1 |
| gnome-applets: | 158 | 28 | 25 | +3 |
| galeon: | 148 | 28 | 30 | -2 |
| dia: | 145 | 14 | 21 | -7 |
| GIMP: | 141 | 28 | 34 | -6 |
| epiphany: | 122 | 28 | 24 | +4 |
| balsa: | 120 | 7 | 0 | +7 |
| sawfish: | 119 | 1 | 0 | +1 |
| gnome-terminal: | 119 | 9 | 6 | +3 |
| GStreamer: | 102 | 11 | 18 | -7 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| bolsh gimp org: | 126 |
| hadess hadess net: | 32 |
| quinet gamers org: | 26 |
| vincent vuntz net: | 25 |
| louie ximian com: | 23 |
| poobar nycap rr com: | 21 |
| federico ximian com: | 17 |
| chpe+gnomebugz stud uni-saarland de: | 16 |
| sven gimp org: | 15 |
| kenneth gnu org: | 15 |
| david davemalcolm demon co uk: | 15 |
| martin wehner epost de: | 14 |
| alexander winston comcast net: | 14 |
| rbultje ronald bitfreak net: | 14 |
| jfleck inkstain net: | 14 |
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
| Most active modules: | Most active hackers:
|
Gnome Summary is brought to you by: Sri Ramkrishna, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Jim Hodapp, and Andrew Coulam.
gnome-summary@gnome.org
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