GNOME Weekly Summary

From: Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>
To: Gnome Summary Distribution List <editor lwn net>, <editors linuxtoday com>, <gnome-announce-list gnome org>, <gnome-list gnome org>
Subject: GNOME Weekly Summary
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 13:00:26 -0800 (PST)
I had forgotten to mail this out.  My apologies.

This is the GNOME Summary for 2004-01-04 - 2004-01-10
    
==============================================================
Table of Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------

1. Goodbye Mark Finlay
2. Interview with Novell trio
3. GNOME-Turk has a party
4. ACME integrated into the Control Center
5. Exclusive Interview with Shaun McCance
6. GNOME 2.5.2 "You want me to blow on your toes?" released
7. The state of the GTK file selector
8. The GIMP - version 2.0pre1
9. Sodipodi SVG Flag Collection
10. iPod support for Rhythmbox
11. List-Admin Help Wanted
12. Translation Status
13. Hacker Activity
14. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
15. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. Goodbye Mark Finlay
--------------------------------------------------------------

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. 


==============================================================
2. Interview with Novell trio
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
3. GNOME-Turk has a party
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
4. ACME integrated into the Control Center
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
5. Exclusive Interview with Shaun McCance
--------------------------------------------------------------

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. 


==============================================================
6. GNOME 2.5.2 "You want me to blow on your toes?" released
--------------------------------------------------------------

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/

==============================================================
7. The state of the GTK file selector
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
8. The GIMP - version 2.0pre1
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
9. Sodipodi SVG Flag Collection
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
10. iPod support for Rhythmbox
--------------------------------------------------------------

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

==============================================================
11. List-Admin Help Wanted
--------------------------------------------------------------

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. 


==============================================================
12. Translation Status
--------------------------------------------------------------


        http://stara.kvota.net/sri/stats26.php?end=2004-01-10&; start=2004-01-04

==============================================================
14. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

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: 10485 (In the last week: New: 673, Resolved: 745, Difference: 
-72)

Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests): 

  nautilus: 734 (In the last week: New: 61, Resolved: 49, Difference: +12)
  gtk+: 638 (In the last week: New: 27, Resolved: 43, Difference: -16)
  control-center: 255 (In the last week: New: 19, Resolved: 11, Difference: +8)
  gnome-vfs: 246 (In the last week: New: 6, Resolved: 7, Difference: -1)
  GnuCash: 222 (In the last week: New: 5, Resolved: 3, Difference: +2)
  gnome-panel: 203 (In the last week: New: 32, Resolved: 33, Difference: -1)
  gnome-applets: 158 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 25, Difference: +3)
  galeon: 148 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 30, Difference: -2)
  dia: 145 (In the last week: New: 14, Resolved: 21, Difference: -7)
  GIMP: 141 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 34, Difference: -6)
  epiphany: 122 (In the last week: New: 28, Resolved: 24, Difference: +4)
  balsa: 120 (In the last week: New: 7, Resolved: 0, Difference: +7)
  sawfish: 119 (In the last week: New: 1, Resolved: 0, Difference: +1)
  gnome-terminal: 119 (In the last week: New: 9, Resolved: 6, Difference: +3)
  GStreamer: 102 (In the last week: New: 11, Resolved: 18, Difference: -7)
  
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs: 
  
  bolsh gimp org: 126 bugs closed.
  hadess hadess net: 32 bugs closed.
  quinet gamers org: 26 bugs closed.
  vincent vuntz net: 25 bugs closed.
  louie ximian com: 23 bugs closed.
  poobar nycap rr com: 21 bugs closed.
  federico ximian com: 17 bugs closed.
  chpe+gnomebugz stud uni-saarland de: 16 bugs closed.
  sven gimp org: 15 bugs closed.
  kenneth gnu org: 15 bugs closed.
  david davemalcolm demon co uk: 15 bugs closed.
  martin wehner epost de: 14 bugs closed.
  alexander winston comcast net: 14 bugs closed.
  rbultje ronald bitfreak net: 14 bugs closed.
  jfleck inkstain net: 14 bugs closed.
  
==============================================================
15. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

Pigeon CD Recorder  - A Gnome2 CD Recorder
General Applet Interface Library  - Library simplifies applet development
Shermans aquarium  - Swimming fish applet
OpenHacha  - OpenHacha is a "free as in freedom" implementation for GNU/Linux 
of the propietary-and-only-for-MS-Windows program Hacha.With OpenHacha you can 
split huge files into small chunks and join the chunks then without problems 
(like cat/split commands).
GnoCHM  - A CHM file viewer
netspeed_applet  - networkspeed monitor applet
Monster Masher  - Monster mashing action game
Dlume  - An easy to use address book.
PureAdmin  - PureFTPd Graphical Manager
Conglomerate  - User-friendly XML editor
Liferea  - RSS/RDF news aggregator
CVSGnome Build Script  - CVSGnome Build Script
XML Security Library  - Implementation of XML Security specs
Silky  - Silky - An easy to use SILC client.
gtk copy-paste buffer  - gtk copy-paste buffer
gURLChecker  - Graphic web links checker
GChemPaint  - 2D chemical structures editor
gLabels  - gLabels is a lightweight program for creating labels and business 
cards for the GNOME desktop environment. It is designed to work with various 
laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you``ll find at most 
office supply stores.

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/latest.php

==============================================================
13. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.

Most active modules:
 115 evolution
 93 gimp
 68 epiphany
 55 conglomerate
 53 openoffice
 51 gtk+
 45 evolution-data-server
 39 gnomeweb-wml
 36 gdesklets
 34 nautilus
 33 gnumeric
 32 balsa
 31 rhythmbox
 30 yelp
 29 gnome-control-center
 28 gnome-games
 28 gnome-utils
 24 webeyes
 24 gnome-applets
 23 gdm2
[160 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 67 danilo
 57 mitr
 51 rodrigo
 44 michael
 41 chpe
 40 cneumair
 37 arafatmedini
 36 laurenti
 34 dave_malcolm
 32 adrighem
 30 chrisime
 28 jordim
 28 serrador
 26 cwryu
 26 jpr
 26 neo
 25 walters
 24 alexl
 24 PeterB
 23 hadess
[201 active hackers omitted]


Gnome Summary is brought to you by: Sri Ramkrishna, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Jim 
Hodapp, and Andrew Coulam. 
gnome-summary gnome org 
Join the Friends of GNOME! http://www.gnome.org/friends
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