GNOME Summary, Feb 29 - March 22 (GUADEC report, FDL, Python/ORBit, GTK+ in 21 days, bug squashing award, GConf article)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

This is the GNOME Summary for February 29 - March 22, 2000.

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  Table of Contents
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 1)  GUADEC
 2)  Free Documentation License
 3)  Python bindings for ORBit
 4)  GTK+ in 21 Days
 5)  Bug squashing kudos
 6)  Intro to GConf Article
 7)  Hacking Activity
 8)  New and Updated Software

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 1)  GUADEC

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Everyone just returned from the GNOME Users and Developers Conference
in Paris, which was a lot of fun and a great success. Kudos to Mathieu
Lacage and the other conference organizers! I'm still recovering from
the jet lag so bear with me.

The big news from GUADEC is the creation of a "GNOME Steering
Committee," 9 people to coordinate the GNOME 2.0 release, and start
setting up a nonprofit GNOME Foundation. The committee has no formal
authority, it's just a smaller group that can try to keep track of
what's going on and be sure we're moving forward on these two goals.

All decisions will still be discussed on gnome-hackers or
gnome-devel-list as appropriate. That is, the committee will basically
just gather information and maybe come up with proposals, it won't be
actually making decisions.

The committee members were chosen to represent major technical areas,
while also getting a cross-section of nationalities and
GNOME-contributing companies. 

 - Miguel de Icaza              (Bonobo, applications)
 - Kjartaan Maraas              (Translation)
 - Dave Mason                   (Documentation)
 - Havoc Pennington             (gnome-libs)
 - James Henstridge             (libglade, language bindings)
 - Owen Taylor                  (glib, GTK+)
 - John Harper                  (window manager)
 - Maciej Stachowiak            (Nautilus)
 - George Lebl, Jacob Berkman   (gnome-core)

So there are 9 members at a time, George and Jacob decided to
alternate meeting-attendance duties. 


In other news, Miguel and I presented the new development roadmap; 
the steering committee will be fleshing out some of the details and 
monitoring progress:
 
  http://developer.gnome.org/status/roadmap.html


It was exciting to see nearly all the major GNOME contributors in one
room; the sheer number of people was impressive. Helix Code, RHAD
Labs, and Eazel combined were only a small fraction of the hackers at
the conference. GNOME's momentum is impressive.

To see bunches of GUADEC attendees for yourself, Ole has the
comprehensive collection of GUADEC photos on his site:

  http://nerdhaven.uio.no/~ole/GUADEC/photos/


The "coolest presentation" award certainly belongs to Andy Hertzfeld
for his presentation of Nautilus; several Nautilus features drew loud
applause from the audience. Mathieu is collecting all the presentations 
on the GUADEC web site, keep checking there:

  http://www.guadec.enst.fr/

Another flashy demo was Michael Meeks's presentation of Bonobo
controls working with Glade. The Glade GUI builder can now load and
manipulate components, just like Delphi or Microsoft Visual Foobar.  A
pretty big deal; component technology is an important part of rapid
application development, and gives us a reasonable way to ship
3rd-party widgets and small nongraphical libraries. Component
technology is roughly similar to the Perl, Apache, or Linux kernel
module systems; hopefully it will give us the same ability to harness
open source development.


One interesting idea from the conference is a language bindings
mailing list.  Guillaume and James were planning to create a list
where language binding authors could work together on GTK/GNOME
enhancements to ease language bindings, and also work together on
binding tools like the defs file.


Helix hosted a huge party on a boat on the Seine on Saturday night;
the horde of drunken GNOME hackers was one of the more frightening
experiences of my life. Somehow there were no major accidents.


Overall it was quite a good time, and an impressive show of GNOME
community momentum. I finally feel like I've met almost all the major
contributors in person, which is pretty cool.


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 2)  Free Documentation License

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The FSF released a new license for use with documentation, and the
GNOME Documentation Project has adopted it for use with GNOME docs. 
Have a look:

  http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

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 3)  Python bindings for ORBit

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


Jason Tackaberry is doing what look like some nice Python bindings for
ORBit, in the spirit of Owen's Perl bindings. 

  http://projects.sault.org/orbit-python/


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 4)  GTK+ in 21 Days

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Donna Martin's book "GTK+ in 21 Days" appears to be out (apparently it
has been out for a little while, but I missed it). The "21 Days"
series isn't renowned for its excellence, but this book may be an
exception - Donna is a frequent and excellent contributor to gtk-list,
and the amazon.com comments on the book are positive so far. So you
might want to have a look at this for a nice intro to GTK+
programming.


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 5)  Bug squashing kudos

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Telsa wrote in to nominate Jason Leach as the bug-fixing hero of the
hour. Jason cleaned a number of pesky gnome-core and gnome-applets
bugs out of bugs.gnome.org in a very short timeframe; moreover they
were the kind of spit-and-polish bugs that really need to get fixed to
give GNOME that finished, professional look.

So Jason Leach is the winner of this week's Telsa Gwynne Bug Crusher
Award. I'm not sure if this award is a weekly feature, but it is a
feature this week.

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

 6)  Intro to GConf Article

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I wrote up a little overview article explaining GConf which resulted
in a lot of nice feedback; if you want to send more feedback, please
do!

  http://developer.gnome.org/feature/current/index.html

Also, I released an up-to-date GConf tarball, and a tarball of the new
text widget I've been working on, see those here:

  http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/952637021/index_html



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 7)  Hacking Activity

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

 112 nautilus
 100 gnome-core
  92 gnome-applets
  74 gnome-db
  69 evolution
  56 gnumeric
  56 gimp
  50 gtk--
  40 libgtop
  34 pybliographer
  32 tktext-port
  29 glade--
  27 gtkhtml
  27 gnome-pilot
  24 glib
  22 gnome-utils
  21 gnome-libs
  20 gnome-guile
  19 gb
  17 control-center
  16 gnome-filer
  15 web-devel-2
  14 dia
  13 gtkticker
  13 gtk+
  13 bonobo

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

 101 martin
  62 rodrigo
  45 darin
  43 jirka
  41 hp
  39 arios
  37 fredgo
  31 jberkman
  30 mmeeks
  30 kenelson
  29 christof
  28 neo
  26 sopwith
  24 ramiro
  24 ettore
  23 danw
  22 eskil
  22 cgabriel
  21 glaurent
  20 peterh
  19 miguel
  18 sullivan
  17 zucchi
  17 jamesh
  16 tonyt
  16 timj
  16 kmaraas
  15 mitch  
  14 wilhelmi
  14 jrb
  14 gregm
  14 dcm


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 8)  New and Updated Software

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An enormous amount of software has appeared since the last summary
(not surprising given my summary-writing slacking lately ;-)

EtherApe - network monitor
gnome-pilot - Palm Pilot connectivity
BBsol - French bulletin board client
gbrctl - ehternet bridging configurator
Pan - Usenet newsreader
wxWindows - cross-platform GUI toolkit (built over GTK)
Jungle Monkey - distributed file-sharing program
Sensor Sweep Applet - lm_sensors applet
Pharmacy - CVS frontend, has a new maintainer
GNOME Breakout - breakout clone
hOpla - link XML files to database
ToutDoux - project manager 
KRunning - manage a running event
MemoPanel - put a memo on the GNOME panel
GHex - binary file editor
URL Collector - store URLs to view later
ORBit-Python - python bindings for ORBit
galway - HTML editor
CCView - C++ project browser
Nova - integrated observational environment for astronomers
Pygmy - mail client
gASQL - database admin program, uses gnome-db
gvoc - vocabulary trainer
Oregano - circuit design
SKIN - canvas item scripting language
gtraffic - traffic game
genSQL - database clients
Pybliographer - bibliography app
RadioDJ - radio device controller
screem - web site tool
GSokoban - puzzle game
gnome-passwd - change your password
MMC - mail client
gxhost - xhost interface
Gnucash - personal finances
gnofin - personal finances 
libglade - load your Glade interface from an XML resource file
gnome-python - Python bindings for GNOME
gmt - kernel module tool
GCO - GNOME comics organizer
Beast/BSE - sound synthesis
gtk-manix - pacman-style game
sawmill - Lisp-extensible window manager
XSitecopy - sync website to remote servers
irssi - IRC client
GMatH - math environment
lua-gnome - GTK bindings for LUA programming language
SNAC - algebraic calculator
gnome-utils - collection of small GNOME tools
xhippo - frontend for command-line music players
gnome-lokkit - firewall configuration wizard
Guppi - data visualization and plotting tool
Overflow - build programs visually
OutMan - manages output from command line tools
GDVD - dvd player
Floyd - scene graph library and VRML viewer
GnomeTV - tuner applet (video4linux)
gbox_applet - mbox file watcher
Wsnitch - http proxy
Mavric - manipulate phylogenetic trees
solfege - eartraining program
GOX - tic-tac-toe
seti_applet - SETI@Home applet
Web Designer - HTML editor
GNet - simple network library built on glib
mounter - mount applet 
GNOME Transcript - database client
GtkExText - enhanced version of GtkText text widget
George - file organizer and CD creator
gnetview - graphical interface for the network
Slasher - grab Slashdot headlines
Hitchhiker 2000 - astronomy app

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