GNOME Summary January 12-18: Project of the Week, Loki job op, web site authors needed, vector graphics, BEAST release, Guppi, Evolution update

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

This is the GNOME Summary for January 12-18, 2000.

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  Table of Contents
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 1)  Projects of the Week
 2)  Loki job opportunity
 3)  Web site content authors needed
 4)  Vector illustrators galore
 5)  BEAST/BSE release
 6)  Guppi reviving; testers needed
 7)  Evolution update
 8)  Hacking Activity
 9)  New and Updated Software

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 1)  Projects of the Week

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In a major ripoff of an AbiSource invention:

  http://www.abisource.com/pow.phtml

I've decided to do a "Project of the Week." This is a small project,
maybe something that would take a day or a weekend, that it would be
cool to have someone working on. Sort of suggestions for hacking or
documenting.  I'll do this every week except weeks when I can't think
of anything; if you think of good POWs then send them in for
inclusion.

I think we should have prizes for doing a POW but I can't think of
any, so we'll mention you in the summary or something. ;-)

If you want to work on a POW, just go for it, and when you have
something working mail gnome-devel-list and let everyone know!

So, two initial projects.

 PROJECT OF THE WEEK NUMBER ONE
 =========

 Sawmill uses Lisp function names to display actions to the user, 
 in the key/mouse binding editor and in the tooltips. The project 
 is to display nice friendly function names instead. For example
 instead of "popup-window-menu" show "Window operations menu" or
 something.

 I figure John Harper could do this in about 5 minutes but for anyone
 else it would probably take a while getting familiar with the Sawmill
 code. If you're interested in Sawmill hacking maybe it's a nice way 
 to get started.

 I didn't ask John about this but I assume he'd take the patch.

 PROJECT OF THE WEEK NUMBER TWO
 =======

 Submitted by Jonathan at the Labs, this one is a much bigger 
 job, for documentation writers:
  GNOME System Administrator Guide

 This could start out pretty small with just a few pages, and 
 grow over time. But someone really needs to get the initial 
 DocBook and some content in CVS.

 The idea is to document the administration of a GNOME installation, 
 such as in a computer lab. How do you set up the panel, gdm, etc.?
 Where are the various config files (MIME types, etc.)? How do 
 you do TCP wrappers for ORBit?

 Someone with experience doing this would obviously be the best author
 of course.

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 2)  Loki job opportunity

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Loki (they port Linux games, such as Quake 3, as you surely know)
typically uses GTK and Glade to port level editors and other Windows
GUI stuff. They're looking to hire a GTK hacker; sounds like a pretty
cool job. Have a look at this announce:

  http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gtk-list/2000-January/0129.shtml

If you're interested mail Michael Vance as it says in the announce.

==============================================================

 3)  Web site content authors needed

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We have a new web site framework in CVS, thanks to Joakim Ziegler at
Simplemente (www.simplemente.net). This will hopefully finally kill
the existing www.gnome.org pages. However, the framework needs content
written and/or "ported" from the old website. If you're interested,
check 'gnomeweb-wml' out from CVS, look at the navigation tree, and
prepare some content to go at one of the nodes.

You'll need WML to build the site, read the README.

==============================================================

 4)  Vector illustrators galore

--------------------------------------------------------------


A while back I mentioned Sketch, the vector graphics program written
in Python/Tkinter and now being ported to GTK. There's also Sodipodi
now, which uses the antialised GnomeCanvas and looks pretty nice;
check out these screenshots:

  http://www.ariman.ee/linux/sodipodi/screenshots.html

So there are at least two promising entries in this field (there's
also Gill, but it is on a much longer timescale).

Of course we have Dia too for higher-level diagrams rather than
illustration.

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 5)  BEAST/BSE release

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Tim put out a new version of BEAST and BSE; look here:

  http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/947866363/index_html

This is a synthesizer application.

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 6)  Guppi reviving; testers needed

--------------------------------------------------------------


Jon Trowbridge has brought Guppi back from the dead in the new
C++-free 'guppi3' CVS module and is looking at making an alpha release
soon. He's looking for people to test the code out before the release,
especially on non-x86 platforms. If you check guppi3 out of CVS and
find problems, mail trow@emccta.com.

The Guppi website is newly-up-to-date:
  http://www.gnome.org/guppi/

If you gave up on Guppi back when I was working on it, have another
look; I think Jon's moving it along quite a bit faster than I was and
the results are pretty cool. Also the project has a better motto than
before.

==============================================================

 7)  Evolution update

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The Helix hackers wrote in with some status updates on Evolution.

Ettore has been working on GtkHTML; the internal structure of the
widget has been rearranged to make it easier to implement user HTML
editing and reduce memory usage. Also, GtkHTML finally accepts data
_before_ the widget is realized, a useful feature. Some simple editing
works already, you can get a cursor and type in text.

Miguel reports that the "shell" written in Python that coordinates all
the Evolution components has been started, but doesn't do so much yet.

Bertrand is almost done with the mbox backend, and will be moving on
to a MIME parser.

Chris is doing some Glade work for the contact editor; of course Helix
is taking advantage of GNOME's Glade technology.

Nat is working on Wombat, the contact manager server.  Wombat "is a
fully asynchronous corba-based API which can support loading contacts
off the local disk or a remote server." The infrastructure is done and
Nat is in debugging mode.

Federico writes in to say: "I am writing the personal calendar server
(PCS), codenamed Tlacuache.  It is similar to Nat Friedman's personal
addressbook server (PAS), codenamed Wombat." I complained on #gnome
that "Tlacuache" is the most unpronounceable, unspellable thing ever
and Miguel says: "Guajolote seems better."  "Guajolote" doesn't seem
that much better to me. :-) Anyway this is not a user-visible name.

The calendar/addressbook servers will be pretty cool; I assume they
are similar to "gconfd", per-user daemons that manage your personal
information.

Here's Federico's description of Tlacuache:
<blockquote>
	1. It provides storage for calendars, internally using
           gnome-vfs and possibly other backends in the future.

	2. It provides the standard mutation functions for a calendar
           on a by-object basis:  add an event, delete an event,
           update an existing event.

	3. It provides semantic query functions:  give me all the
           events that occur in a specified range of time, including
           instances of recurrences.

	4. It provides a notification interface so that multiple
           clients can access a calendar at the same time:  an object
           was added, an object was removed, an object has changed.

Everything is a Bonobo object with a CORBA interface.

When this is finished, likely tomorrow, I will modify Gnomecal to use
it as its main storage and event generation engine.  Thus Tlacuache
will act as a data model and recurrence/alarm engine, and Gnomecal
will act as a simple view/controller.
</blockquote>

Between Evolution, gconfd, OAF, etc. it looks like GNOME is rapidly
becoming a giant swarm of CORBA servers (which I think was the
original GNOME plan, over 2 years ago; we didn't know how much
infrastructure we needed!).

==============================================================

 8)  Hacking Activity

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Module Score-O-Matic:
 (number of CVS commits per module, since the last summary)

  85 gnumeric
  68 gimp
  47 guppi3
  45 libgtop
  42 gnome-libs
  35 gnomeicu
  28 nautilus
  27 evolution
  27 beast
  19 galway
  18 gnome-core
  16 gnome-guile
  16 gb
  15 gnome-db
  15 gconf
  14 gtkhtml
  14 gnome-pilot
  13 gtk--
  11 gnomeweb-wml
  10 gnome-vfs

User Score-O-Matic:
 (number of CVS commits per user, since the last summary)

  56 martin
  47 trow
  45 arios
  27 timj
  26 jwise
  26 hp
  25 unammx
  23 jirka
  20 rasta
  20 jpekka
  18 jody
  18 darin
  17 mortenw
  16 campd
  15 rodrigo
  15 cactus
  14 ettore
  13 sopwith
  13 monniaux
  11 utx
  11 neo
  11 kmaraas
  11 jfell
  11 eskil
  11 ahyden

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 9)  New and Updated Software

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GId3toHtml - generate HTML listing your MP3's
Oregano - cool circuit designer/simulator 
Sodipodi - Vector illustration program
solfege - ear training
irssi - IRC client
Seahorse - GPG frontend
seti_applet - monitor your SETI@Home client
lua-gnome - bindings for the lua programming language
GtkExText - replacement text widget for GTK+
CD Changer Applet - applet to deal with CD eject/mount/etc.
gdxr2 - frontend for dvdplay
Pygmy - mail client written in Python
Gnetutil - GUI for ping, traceroute, etc.
CSCMail - another mail client, in Perl
VDKBuilder - C++ RAD tool
VDK - C++ wrapper for GTK+/GNOME
GNet - simple networking library in glib style
Finder - Mac-style finder bar
gnome-ttt-[3D] - tic tac toe, 3D and non-3D versions
gmt - module management GUI
Cloned Xunzip - file decompressor
gatO- interface to the "at" command
GnomeICU - ICQ client

See the software map on www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for more
information about any of these packages.

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Until next week - 

Havoc