GNOME Summary, June 14-21

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

This is the GNOME Summary for June 14-21.  Thanks to Josh Baugher for
suggesting the new easier-to-read format, which includes... a table of
contents! (applause)

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Table of Contents
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 1) Corel Linux Advisory Council
 2) Thanks, VB hackers!
 3) Multimedia Framework
 4) Help us Close Bug Reports
 5) GNOME For Kids?
 6) New Red Hat 6.0 RPMs
 7) Mail User Agent #3
 8) SVG
 9) Presentation Software?
 10) Hacking Activity
 11) New and Updated Software

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1) Corel Linux Advisory Council

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I went to the Corel Linux Advisory Council at the beginning of the
week. The main interesting thing was the opportunity to talk with
Cristian Tiberna from KDE, Dan Quinlan from Linux Standard Base, and
Darren Benham from Debian. Cristian and I talked about a *lot* of
things that we want to do together; some of the ideas:

 - Common IDL interfaces for apps, and common object activation
 - Window Manager Spec
 - Session management extensions
 - Sharing Raph's libart library with KDE
 - Common style guide (locations of menu items, etc.)
 - Just hang out and be friendly. :-)

Of course, we already have drag-and-drop, a shared "menu entry"
format, and I think something else that I can't remember. Also, there
were about 50 messages on the new wm-spec-list today, including people
from Gnome, KDE, and neither, so things seem to be rolling on that
front. I didn't see any flames yet.

It's also possible to write apps with both a Gnome and a KDE frontend,
sharing the "hard parts." My Guppi app is designed this way, though it has
no K frontend yet (hint, hint).

Cristian and I are planning to post to gnome-kde-list@gnome.org soon
to get discussion started on these issues. We also want to start
working on some common IDL on a CVS server somewhere; we'd probably do
a read-only mirror to the Gnome and KDE servers for convenience. More
details to come on gnome-kde-list.

I talked quite a bit to Dan and Darren as well. The fact is that
making free Unix clones easy to use isn't going to be possible without
changing some of the lower-level aspects of the system; we can't talk
to PPP or the printer properly, for example. A text entry box for your
lpr command isn't going to cut it. So, coordination with and
standardization across distributions is going to be
important. Obviously we were talking about Linux, but ideally some of
these things would also be standardized with the BSD and Hurd people.

I begged for CORBA stuff to go in the Linux Standard Base so people
could have a real interface to standard services, but I'm not
optimistic.:-)

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2) Thanks, VB hackers!

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Man, there are a lot of people that do Visual Basic coding at their
day job. I left for the Corel Linux Advisory Council Monday morning,
and when I got back I had 26 emails either telling me how to get the
Excel IDL or with the Excel IDL attached. Thanks to: Bernhard Reiter,
Steve Geswein, Kevin Conder, Dirk-Jan, Richard Browne, Stefan Elisa
Kapus, Martijn van Beers, jreed@ddiworld-no-spam.com, Gerard Mason,
Geoff Rivell, Michael Lambert, John Frandolig, Barry Hoggard, Ray
Deese, Timothy Cook, Eric Lloyd, Rhet Turnbull, Richard Hestilow, Per
Winkvist, Craig Oshima, Mark Benvenuto, Don Sime, Dariusz Olszewski,
and Ramon Garcia Fernandez.

I owe all of you guys big. Many, many thanks.

There are now two problems:

 - This IDL is freakin' *huge* - 150K of *interface* - pity me guys,
   I have to implement this beast...

 - We've gotten worried about the legal/copyright implications of
   this. We have a lawyer examining the issue, and in the meantime 
   I haven't looked at the IDL in order to remain "clean room." So 
   the project is on the back burner for a bit. We'll see what the
   lawyer has to say.

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3) Multimedia Framework

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One thing we want to do in the Gnome project is work on a multimedia
framework for free Unix systems. Elliot has a new white paper on this,
at: 

  http://www.gnome.org/white-papers/GMF/index.html

If you've noticed that Gnome has spinoffs in all kinds of non-desktop
directions, you noticed correctly. We've realized that what we really
want to do is make the free Unix clones a nice platform for desktop
use. And it turns out that the GUI isn't the whole picture; we also
need lower-level changes and enhancements. The nice thing is that
everyone benefits, even if they don't use Gnome the GUI.

Hopefully more people will be getting involved in these kinds of
initiatives; even if you're not necessarily interested in GUI
programming, there's some fun stuff to do that improves
GNU/Linux/BSD/Hurd usability.

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4) Help us Close Bug Reports

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Michael Zucchi suggested that it would be helpful for bug report
submitters to help us close the reports. That is, if you submit a
report, and later notice that it's been fixed, please send mail to the
bug's email address; this is especially important if the bug is
difficult to reproduce - sometimes maintainers aren't sure if the bug
is gone.

A bug's email address is the bug number at bugs.gnome.org. For
example, 100@bugs.gnome.org. If you submit a bug, you'll get an
automatic reply telling you the bug number; you can also look up the
bug on http://bugs.gnome.org.

This would be very helpful; it can take hours to slog through pending
bugs and figure out the status of each one. If you can simplify the
maintainer's life, they'll have more time for real bugs.

As always, new bugs should go to submit@bugs.gnome.org, following the
instructions at http://bugs.gnome.org/Reporting.html. Briefly, the
first two lines in your mail should be:

     Package: hello
     Version: 1.3-2

Substituting the appropriate package and version. This keeps us from
having to manually file the bug, and forwards the bug to the proper
maintainer.

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5) GNOME For Kids?

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I got the following email; there's an address at the end if you're
interested in working with these guys.

"We're looking for people who may be interested in helping us develop
GNOME so that it's suited for use by children as young as 4 years. One of
the problems we've always had developing software is finding ways to get
around the complexity of the OS so that kids can really use our stuff. So
the mission is to change the Environment and then that problem will no
longer exist!

"We've been developing software for this age group for about 7 years now
so have the experience to do this from an educational point of view.

"We would be looking in particular for hackers with the following skills.

"1) Knowledge of security and networking with Linux/Unix so that
Teacher/Parent user accounts could control class user accounts.

"Example. Application which has configurable features could be controlled
for pupil Billy or configuration changes could be applied to a whole
class or members of a class.

"This needs to be well thought out from the start.

"2) People who could help setup themes for Enlightenment and GTK that
would appeal to children. We can do artwork if people offer their
technical skills.

"3) Obviously keen programmers in GTK and GNOME with all levels of
experience.

"4) People who really know their stuff with regards printing, video
playback and sound.

"One of the most important goals is to get the whole thing as easy as
possible to install and use. Teachers and parents are generally not
computing experts and 4 year olds certainly aren't. Maybe people involved
in the general GNOME distribution could contribute and vice versa in this
department.

"This is of course Open source and has nothing to do with our business.
We're commited to seeing this possibly very cool piece of technology
through to the end. It would be, as far as I know, the first of its kind
on any OS and children deserve something of their own - they're just as
important as we are.

"Please announce this. You can Email at malonowa@wanadoo.fr"

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6) New Red Hat 6.0 RPMs

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Dr Mike announced some updates to the RH 6.0 RPMs; these are in their
"Rawhide" distribution. The updated RPMs are:

 gdm
 gtk-1.2.3
 gnome-core-1.0.6
 gnome-libs-1.0.10
 control-center
 enlightenment

In Dr Mike's words:

"These fix a variety of small issues, and should not be considered
urgent updates.  Instead if you like to "life on the edge" these
RPMS are for you. As they are part of the Rawhide releases, they have
not been tested as strenuously as RPMS in the Red Hat Linux product, so
your mileage may vary.

"You can get the rawhide updates from ftp://rawhide.redhat.com and its numerous
mirror sites."

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7) Mail User Agent #3

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We have yet another mail user agent, joining Balsa and the
gnome-mailer project. This one is called Pygmy, and it's written in
Python. You can find it at:

  http://www.cs.uit.no/~kjetilja/Pygmy/

Screenshots look cool.

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8) SVG

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Raph's SVG thingy has screenshots and a home page now; man, it looks
nice. It looks really nice. It's smooth like butter. You are going to
like it:

  http://www.levien.com/svg/

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9) Presentation Software?

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Achtung!, the Gnome presentation program, has been stalled forever; in
the meantime, a different program called gnome-diagram silently showed
up on the software map. There's no source code yet, but some info and
screenshots:

  http://perso.wanadoo.fr/david-crosson-w3/gnome-diagram.html

I hope we can merge this with Achtung!, or just forget Achtung!, and
integrate the single resulting program with Gnome Workshop, Bonobo,
etc. It's certainly nice to see people working in this area.

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10) Hacking Activity

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About 561 commits this week, comparable to last week. 

The CVS Module Score-O-Matic this week gives:

 109 web-devel-2
  49 gnumeric
  44 gphoto
  43 gnome-libs
  29 gimp
  26 ORBit-C++
  19 gxsnmp
  14 e
  12 gnome-core
  11 gbuild
   9 esound
   9 control-center
   8 mc
   8 gnome-db
   8 gnome-admin
   8 gill
   8 Eterm

I think the web guys commit every 5 minutes so they can look at their
changes:-) (there's a script that updates the live site every little bit
from CVS). 

Gnumeric has made it through that long, hard period at the beginning
of every free software project where no one cares; it now has a user
base and a fairly large number of people hacking it. The mailing list
is pretty active and there are tons of commits. Gnumeric is quite
useful; it even imports Excel files well. Check it out.

On to the CVS User Score-O-Matic:

  65 sopwith
  37 dcm
  26 scottf
  26 rgarcia
  24 zucchi
  23 pablo
  20 mortenw
  17 gregm
  17 drmike
  16 mawarkus
  13 srust
  13 raph
  13 jrb
  12 mmeeks
  11 mej
  11 mandrake
  11 jaka

Subjective rambling: 

Well, basically I was gone the first half of the week and I spent the
second half trying to catch up, so I didn't pay any attention.
I didn't see anything really new appear, and the Score-O-Matic
summarizes nicely what was most active.

It seems notable that ORBit-C++ has been reawakened by rgarcia, and
we're finally going to have C++ bindings for ORBit. That'll be nice.


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11) New and Updated Software

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Lots of new or updated software map entries this week:

POP Checker
gtkdiff
screem
Blackbox patch
Gill 
wxWindows/Gtk
Trinity
GMyNews
gnofin
GNU Photo
LineFeed
GnomePM
Nightfall
gnome-diagram
GOdo
GHex
GSokoban
NTool
RPM Explorer
GnoMail
ggv
libglade

Whoa, there were a couple more MUA's in there. This is worse than IRC
clients.:-) They're proliferating like bunnies.

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OK, can't think of anything else. Until next week -

Havoc