Weekly Edition
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GNOME Summary
This is the GNOME Summary for 2002-08-12 - 2002-08-16
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Table of Contents
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1. Return of Medusa
2. Gstreamer state of affairs
3. gftp in gnome CVS
4. ZDnet looks at Evolution
5. Abiword table support moving forward
6. GNOME 2 todo list.
7. Bugs getting fixed
8. Gnumeric gets Pango groove
9. Gtk# 0.4 is out
10. GNOME in Arabic moves forward
11. Hacker Activity
12. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
13. New and Updated Software
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1. Return of Medusa
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One of the libraries developed by Eazel as part of Nautilus was Medusa.
Medusa was a library which provided much of the search and indexing
functionality for Nautilus. Unfortunatly due to some bad bugs Medusa
never got wide distribution and Eazel had to waive the white flag before
the bugs could get fixed. Rebecca Schulman who created the library while
at Eazel is still working on it however and this week discussion broke
out on the nautilus development mailing list if maybe the time for
re-inclusion of medusa is coming closer. One of the cool things about
the Medusa library is that in addition to providing basic file search
capabilities to Nautilus is adds a module for indexing all textfiles on
your system. This capability can also be extended to other type of files
giving you a searchable index of all supported documents on your system.
Anyway the time for the return of Medusa depends on when Rebecca or one
of the other talented hackers in the Nautilus community gets it and the
corresponsing GUI code in Nautilus back up to speed. Personally I hope
this will be sooner rather than later.
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2. Gstreamer state of affairs
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In order to help the wider GNOME community get a feel for the current
state of GStreamer I recently wrote a short status report. It tries to
give a small report on where the multimedia framework stands currently.
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/1504/0/9383806/
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3. gftp in gnome CVS
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A long time favourite application in the GNOME community has been the
gftp ftp client. Brian Masney moved gftp into GNOME CVS not long ago, so
gftp could take benefit of the GNOME development infrastructure like our
wonderfull i18n team. Welcome onboard Brian.
http://www.gftp.org/
http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=gftp
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4. ZDnet looks at Evolution
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ZDnet has an article talking about how Ximian Evolution helps makes
Linux an option on the corporate desktop due to its support for
Microsoft Exchange servers. Nice to see this sort of mainstream press
attention even if the article is not extremly interesting.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2878203,00.html
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5. Abiword table support moving forward
--------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Sevior is continuing to work on getting good table support into
Abiword. He just released this screenshot showing the new table cell
merging functionality in action. Screenshot also displays the new Gtk2
frontend being developed for Abiword.
http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/mergeCells.png
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6. GNOME 2 todo list.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Meeks updated his list of todo's for GNOME2. It is a small list
of tasks Michael thinks are suiteable for someone who wants to get
started working on GNOME. Please check it out and see if you find any
interesting tasks.
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/todo.html
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7. Bugs getting fixed
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The unyielding bug squishing action in GNOME CVS continues. Two
longstanding bugs had fixes checked into CVS recently. Michael Meeks
fixed the non-critical but anoying bug that has been causing the desktop
backround to get redrawn as Nautilus is started. A more critical bug
that is now fixed is support for menu editing in GNOME2. This means you
can now graphically edit your panel menu again and also when new
software are installed they show up immediately in the menu. A big
thanks to Alex Gravely of Ximian for getting menu editing working
properly.
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8. Gnumeric gets Pango groove
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Jody Goldberg and the Gnumeric team made a new development release of
Gnumeric for GNOME 2. With this relase Gnumeric is now fully using Pango
which means you will be able to use things arabic and indic languages in
your spreadsheets. Lots of other nice additons too in this release. Full
release notes below.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-August/msg00080.html
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9. Gtk# 0.4 is out
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Mike Kestner made the 0.4 release of the C# bindings for GNOME this
week. The use and development of the bindings seems already to have
reached a very high level so we might get to see Gtk# based applications
start popping up in the not to distant future. Full announcement below.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-August/msg00072.html
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10. GNOME in Arabic moves forward
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The support for Arabic in GNOME2 is moving forward rapidly. Thanks to
the great team at arabeyes.org large parts of GNOME2 has already been
translated as shown by the screenshot by Hicham Amaoui linked below.
Also a longstanding Pango bug relating to accelerators in Arabic has
finally gotten a patch so hopefully that issue will be resolved soon
too. Thanks to Roozbeh Pournader for making the patch.
http://amaoui.free.fr/gnome2/images/gnome2ar.png
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83058
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12. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
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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: 7290 (In the last week: New: 619, Resolved: 889,
Difference:
-270)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
nautilus: 786 (In the last week: New: 49, Resolved: 29, Difference:
+20)
gtk+: 588 (In the last week: New: 12, Resolved: 6, Difference: +6)
gnome-vfs: 286 (In the last week: New: 7, Resolved: 5, Difference: +2)
GIMP: 284 (In the last week: New: 15, Resolved: 7, Difference: +8)
galeon: 274 (In the last week: New: 83, Resolved: 73, Difference: +10)
sawfish: 184 (In the last week: New: 3, Resolved: 3, Difference: 0)
gnome-applets: 169 (In the last week: New: 24, Resolved: 21,
Difference: +3)
gnome-panel: 161 (In the last week: New: 40, Resolved: 26, Difference:
+14)
gnome-core: 129 (In the last week: New: 33, Resolved: 341, Difference:
-308)
control-center: 121 (In the last week: New: 20, Resolved: 58,
Difference: -38)
gnome-terminal: 97 (In the last week: New: 20, Resolved: 15,
Difference: +5)
balsa: 96 (In the last week: New: 9, Resolved: 12, Difference: -3)
medusa: 94 (In the last week: New: 0, Resolved: 2, Difference: -2)
gnome-pilot: 85 (In the last week: New: 6, Resolved: 29, Difference:
-23)
glib: 82 (In the last week: New: 3, Resolved: 2, Difference: +1)
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
kmaraas@gnome.org: 372 bugs closed.
vincent@vuntz.net: 114 bugs closed.
yaneti@declera.com: 57 bugs closed.
louie@ximian.com: 37 bugs closed.
jody@gnome.org: 25 bugs closed.
mpeseng@tin.it: 12 bugs closed.
bfrantzdale@hmc.edu: 12 bugs closed.
shane.oconnor@ireland.sun.com: 12 bugs closed.
daniel@veillard.com: 11 bugs closed.
jaka@gnu.org: 11 bugs closed.
r.burton@180sw.com: 10 bugs closed.
chris@rebelbase.com: 10 bugs closed.
micke@codefactory.se: 10 bugs closed.
bordoley@msu.edu: 9 bugs closed.
otaylor@redhat.com: 9 bugs closed.
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11. Hacker Activity
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Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
15 gnome-pim
7 totem
7 mc
5 gtk+
5 gtkmm-root
5 gnome-i18n
5 gedit
5 xmlsec
4 sodipodi
3 gimp
3 metacity
3 gnomemeeting
3 galeon
2 gnumeric
2 gnome-games
2 gnome-user-docs
2 profterm
2 dia
2 libgda
1 glib
[17 active modules omitted]
Most active hackers:
16 srittau
10 dnloreto
7 proskin
6 bansz
5 hadess
5 murrayc
5 paolo
5 aleksey
4 tml
4 cneumair
3 hp
3 roozbeh
2 rodrigo
2 lclausen
2 drake
2 utx
2 neo
2 lauris
2 chyla
1 yaneti
[12 active hackers omitted]
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13. New and Updated Software
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gLabels - creating labels and business cards.
Quick Lounge - Quick Launch for GNOME 2
Totem - Movie player based on the xine libraries
CVSGnome Build Script - CVSGnome Build Script
screem - Web Site Editor
XML Security Library - Implementation of XML Security specs
Yelp - Help browser for GNOME 2.0
GnuCash - A personal finance manager
gcompressor - gui for compression decompression tolls.
gedit - Lightweight UTF-8 text editor
gtktalog - Disk catalog tool
gdm - GNOME Display Manager
gob - GObject Builder
gnome-utils - A collection of small applications
Gnome RIG - A GUI for Hamlib
libelysium - Set of utility functions
Emphetamine - Download Manager for GNOME
gramps - GNOME based genealogy program
Balsa - Gnome Mail Client
Pan - Usenet newsreader
Goats - Sticky notes applet
gtkmm2 - GTK+ C++ binding
For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map:
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/latest.php
Lots of nice things happening this week also thanks to our dedicated
team of developers, translators and others. John Hall pointed out during
GUADEC in Sevilla that we should be better at saying thank you to the
people behind the software, not just be good at sending them complaints
or requests. So if you come accross a nice GNOME application this week
that you really like, remember to send the author a small mail simply
saying; thanks.
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org
(Log in to post comments)
Medusa issues Posted Aug 29, 2002 17:16 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I have some concerns that the former Eazel people, coming out of the Mac world, are thinking exclusively of the situation where a home user has all her files on disks physically connected to one computer. At work, I operate in an environment where about a terabyte of data is accessible through automounted NFS and SMB servers, and my home directory is NFS-mounted as well. In an environment like this, it will not be very nice if a Medusa daemon fired up and tried to index the world, and if it restricted itself to indexing local disks, it would be of no use, because none of my data is stored locally. In fact, I had just this problem when trying out early versions of Nautilus which contained early, buggy versions of Medusa.
Issues with right-to-left languages Posted Aug 29, 2002 17:26 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] While I'm at it: looking at the screenshot of the Arabic Gnome desktop, something strikes me as odd: Arabic, like Hebrew, is a right-to-left language. But in the Nautilus window, we see the Arabic text for "Location:" to the left of the URL. Now, I don't read Arabic or any other right-to-left language, but it strikes me that this is not natural; it would look to me as if I were expected to deal with a toolbar that says http://lwn.net :Location I would think that the user would want this to be flipped around, so that the label for the text field would be on the right.
It's worse than that... Posted Aug 29, 2002 17:45 UTC (Thu) by sab39 (guest, #2185) [Link] If your language goes from right to left, why would you think of an arrow pointing to the left is a useful metaphor for "back"?Now, I don't *know* that it would be wrong to use a left arrow in this way, but it seems like it would. I've heard that it's possible for either GTK or Glade to completely reverse the layout of your windows for RTL languages, and I'm surprised that wasn't activated here. For example, why should 'File' (the most commonly used menu item) be the last one to appear? Likewise, the Back and Forward buttons are the most frequently used in a browser, and appear last on the toolbar from this perspective. The tab controls in the dialog boxes appear at the end of the dialog instead of the start. Etc, etc. Perhaps the option *is* available and just wasn't turned on for the screenshot. I'd still be surprised (and impressed) if the sense of the 'back' and 'forward' button icons got reversed, though.
it's free software- finding bugs and fixing them takes time Posted Aug 29, 2002 19:12 UTC (Thu) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link] Gtk does have 'mirroring' ability, but... it's sort of a chicken and egg problem. The mirroring stuff (and other details that can't be taken care of at the toolkit level, but which must be done within the app) is not really tested much at all. Why is it not tested? well, there are virtually no translations, so it's hard for the people who would test it to use it. Of course, why are there few translations? Because there are many problems with mirroring and such. So... it's going to take some brave souls to test and find all of the bugs. Once that starts happening I expect we'll see fixes as well. [The Arabic team has already fixed several such bugs already, I believe, at least some of which will help all R-to-L languages.]
It's worse than that... Posted Aug 30, 2002 19:15 UTC (Fri) by Peter (guest, #1127) [Link] (Disclaimer: I do not speak or write any bidi languages.) If your language goes from right to left, why would you think of an arrow pointing to the left is a useful metaphor for "back"? Hmmmmmmmm, very good point. Your other points, about window tabs and so forth, are good as well. However, there is a practical issue: computers are predominantly Western, and UI development seems to be almost exclusively so. People who speak Semitic languages probably already use applications with window tabs on the left, <- arrows meaning "back", and so forth. While it may not seem natural to them in their native languages, it is a convention to which most are probably already accustomed. Changing the layout of an entire window just because it is being used in an Arabic locale would seem to cause continuity problems for those users migrating from less advanced software, or less advanced versions of the same software. Chicken and egg, indeed. If one can assume Semitic language users will predominantly be people new to computer GUIs, OTOH, your proposals make perfect sense. The mouse cursor itself should, of course, be mirrored as well. I'm gonna have to remember to ask my sister (a trained linguist who can read/write Hebrew) about this....
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