ANNOUNCE: Conduit 0.3.5

["John Stowers" <john stowers gmail com>]

Hey Everyone!

I am proud to announce the sixth release in the Conduit development
series: Conduit 0.3.5

 * Download: http://download.gnome.org/sources/conduit/0.3/
 * Screenshots/Screencast: http://www.conduit-project.org/wiki/Screenshots

== Bugs Fixed ==
 * Conduits embedded web browser should no longer crash.
 * Canceling synchronization should now work reliably and no longer
block the GUI.
 * Correctly restore two-way sync setting. Patch from Yann Rouillard.
 * Escape patch in folder scanner. Fixes webdav sync. Patch from Yann Rouillard.
 * Improve handling of TempFiles
 * Remove dependence on xml.dom.ext (PyXML)
 * Remove dependence on python-avahi
 * The conflict expander (and window) should now move out of the way gracefully
 * Abstracted much of the uri handling to ease transition to gio/gvfs
 * Many fixes to work with python 2.4
 * Update to new backpack API

== New Features ==
 * Move to GNOME SVN and Bugzilla
 * In memory mapping DB has been replace with sqlite based one. Should
reduce memory usage during large sync's.
 * Restructure code layout to allow Conduit to be used as a library by
other python programs.
 * Removed Gtk dependancy in core. Conduit command line can now be run
without Gtk installed.
 * Added 'always up to date' infrastructure for automatic syncing.
 * Improved n800 support for syncing audio, video and photos to the device.
 * New AudioVideoConverter for transcoding media types (uses FFMPEG
and/or mencoder)
 * Include Banshee support in configure.ac - from lool
 * Support data hashes in addition to mtimes as a means for detecting changes
 * Remove twisted dependency for network sync. Uses the built in
python xmlrpc module
 * Use python logging module for better logging granularity
 * Make HAL easier to extend in dataprovider factories
 * Files that did not load correctly are shown in the preferences
window to help debugging
 * Experimental maemo/hildon UI (Thomas)
 * Added iPod photos support
 * Write support in f-spot using its new dbus interface (Thomas)
 * Support tags in all datatypes (useful for images)
 * Incredible improvements in test coverage. 75% lines of core code
tested (including close to 100% of the core sync engine)
 * RSS Feed source now supports video enclosures
 * Many many bug fixes as a result of test focus

== Known Issues ==
 * Not yet working with Tomboy SVN head
 * The new Shutterfly image dataprovider (Contributed by Jeremy
Slater) is broken
 * For two way F-spot sync remember to run F-spot from SVN and enable
the F-spot preferences option "Allow other programs to manipulate
F-spot"
 * Gmail support is not yet robust

== Evolution Python ==
 * This has now been moved to
[http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-python-desktop/trunk/evolution/
GNOME SVN] in the gnome-python-desktop module

== Notes to Packagers ==
 * Web browser problems and crashes
   * If users experience crashes, this is most likely due to a combination of;
     * Using conduit's built in web browser
     * /usr/bin/conduit wrapper not picking up firefox (and doing all
its LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks correctly
   * To resolve these issues ;
     * Look at the conduit wrapper and ensure the run-mozilla.sh gets called OR
     * Make the default web browser the system one (patch Settings.py)
AND patch the Facebook dataprovider so it uses the system browser
 * F-spot
   * If you are shipping F-spot from SVN (i.e. a version of F-spot
that includes the DBus interface) you should only ship
FSpotDbusModule.py and remove FSpotModule.py as it is not going to be
supported once a stable F-spot is released
   * If you do wish to make the Conduit + F-spot experience better
then consider changing the default value of F-spot's "Allow other
programs to manipulate F-spot" preference to True
 * Dependencies
   * We require pygoocanvas > 0.9.0
   * We depend on python-vobject (and it brings in python date-util)
   * We ship a modified FlickrAPI (do not remove it)
   * We use libgmail from SVN
   * iPod photos requires libgpod > 0.6.0
   * If you use the gtkmozembed web browser then we require the python
bindings to it
   * The AV converters require ffmpeg and mencoder
   * Since evolution-python is now in gnome-python-desktop we require
a recent unstable release of that module
 * Conduit is configured to autorun at system startup. You can disable
this if you like as there is currently no way to do so within conduit
 * There is no way to configure the gconf sync at this time. You can
select a default set of gconf keys to sync by patching the
dataprovider directly.
 * 0.4.0 will be a stable release. It is scheduled to be released with
(and support) GNOME 2.22

== Warning ==
This is a development release. Please do not use on data which you do
not have otherwise backed up. If you are uncertain about Conduit then
please select the "Ask me" option from conduit preferences with regard
to two way synchronization - this prevents Conduit from deleting or
overwriting files unless you explicitly tell it to.

What is Conduit
==========
Conduit is a synchronization application for GNOME. It allows you to
synchronize your data between online web services (Gmail,
backpackit.com, Flickr, PicasaWeb, Box.net, etc) and your computer.

What Can Conduit Do
=============
For a list of all the services that conduit supports see
 * http://www.conduit-project.org/wiki/SyncStatus

In the one way sync/export case Conduit is smart in the sense that if
a piece of data has not been modified then it will not be
synchronized/exported again, it will replace the existing data. In
addition if data is subsequently removed from a source then its
corresponding data will also be deleted.

Conduit has a full featured DBus interface to allow other application
authors to use Conduit to perform the synchronization and export tasks
of their applications.

Conclusion
=======
More and more people use online services to organise their life, I
hope Conduit can be the bridge between peoples computers and the web.

http://www.conduit-project.org