Haven't posed here for a while ...

PyORBit

Put out a few releases of PyORBit. Seems to work quite well, although it still needs some more work. CVS gnome-python is already using it, but I haven't put out any tarballs yet (which I should do -- it has been too long since the last releases).

fontilus

I started working on another small GNOME package a few weeks ago: a set of tools to help manage fonts on fontconfig based GNOME systems (such as GNOME 2.1.x and Red Hat 8.0). Here are a few screenshots of what it can do:

Jury Duty (almost)

Thursday, 17 October

I received a letter, dated 16 October, saying that I have jury duty in 5 days (Tuesday). Rather than being held at the closer Perth District Court, it is to be held out at Fremantle :( The Weird thing is that it says that I should notify them at least 5 days before hand if I should be excluded.

I spent the weekend wondering about what it will be like, and wondering why it was scheduled at such short notice.

The client side of PyORBit should be pretty usable now. Marshalling and demarshalling of pretty much all types is working well. I ported most of test/everything/client.c to Python using PyORBit, which helped test the a lot of the code.

I support pretty much all of the complex types pretty well (structures, unions, sequences, arrays, exceptions, anys).

I fixed the weird typelib bug (bug 94513), and checked the fix into both HEAD and gnome-2-0 branches of ORBit2 (haven't had a release yet though). I need to look at porting the fix for bug 93928 back to the gnome-2-0 branch. I ran into some other bugs while working on the union support: bug 95581 and bug 95591. Hopefully I can get both of these resolved and a new ORBit2-2.4.x release put out.

linux.conf.au

Registrations are now open!

PyORBit

Fixed up handling of return values for all types. Now I need to look at the handling of arguments. The semantics of ORBit_small_invoke_stub are non trivial. Also fixed a bug in the marshalling of sequences to python types.

Tracked down and fixed one of the typelib bugs. Turned out to be a subtle bug in the IDL compiler.

PyORBit

Started working on a new binding for ORBit2 about a week ago. The existing orbit-python port to ORBit2 is a little crufty, and doesn't take advantage of the new features in ORBit2. So far things have looked fairly promising, but I have turned up a number of ORBit2 bugs related to the use of typelibs. Some of them are pretty weird (such as bug 93928 and bug 94513), while others indicate defficiencies in the current typelib implementation itself (bug 93725). I don't know if I will be able to get it to a usable state when compiled with ORBit2 2.4.x, so I might have to wait til GNOME 2.2 before using these in the GNOME Python bindings.

Egg

Did a bit of work on EggToolbar and got it into a state where I could use it in EggMenu. Felt good to work on these, as they had been neglected for a while. The toolbar works quite well now, and I brought the merge code for toolbars in EggMenu into parity with the menu merge code (now supports placeholders, etc).

PyGIMP

Yosh added a little bit of magic to the autogen script for GIMP so that if you have automake-1.6, it will optionally build PyGIMP. So it should be as simple as running “./configure --enable-python” on the gimp-1.3.9 tarball to install PyGIMP.

malcolm: I believe "en_SE" is the language code you are after, although google seems to use xx-bork.

Started working on the python bindings for gimp 1.3. It has been a long time since I had done much with that code (a lot of the code hadn't been changed in 3 years), and it was a bit embarassing to see how bad some of it was ...

I now have it mostly working, and updated to take advantage of new Python 2.2 features (given that pygtk for gtk 2.0 uses Python 2.2, there was no point in artificially limiting what constructs to use). Now I am using new style classes for all the various gimp objects (which means that issubclass(gimp.Layer, gimp.Drawable) is now true). It is almost at a stage where it could be added to the main tarball builds of gimp.

Put out new releases of pygtk and gnome-python for GTK 1.2 and 2.0. The new releases support parallel install in the same installation of Python. The new pygtk-1.99.13 release also includes the patches necessary to build out of the box on windows.

Also updated the generated pygtk documentation. This version includes the documentation for Boxed and Pointer types, adds a class synopsis at the start of each section, and a full class heirachy at the beginning. Hopefully they will be a bit more useful for people now. I also customised the xml to html stylesheets to generate a .devhelp file, which means that I can browse the documentation in DevHelp.

On Sunday, the white of my right eye was almost completely red, which was a bit of a shock. I went to the doctor on Monday, who didn't know what the problem was exactly, so prescribed some prednisolone eye drops. They seem to be working okay, and the red has retreated to just one side of the pupil, and will hopefully be gone in a day or too, which is a relief.

Got the nautilus view up and running. A number of pictures of an early version are at:

• Information page
• Files page
• Provides and Requires page

In the current version, provides and requires have been split onto separate pages (and I added conflicts and obsoletes), and they are only visible if there is anything to show. There is also a changelog page for information about development of the package.

I added support for looking at info about package files on disk (as opposed to info about installed packages), which didn't take much code.

linux.conf.au

The call for papers is almost over. If you want to speak, please send in your abstracts soon.

GNOME

I started writing up some code to add RPM support to Nautilus. At the moment, I just have a simple GNOME VFS module that allows you to see what packages are on the system. You can see a sample of what it looks like here. The package sizes represent the installed size of the package (as reported in the RPM database), and the modification times are the installation times of the packages.

One of the annoying problems with libtool is the way the -export-symbols and -export-symbols-regex. The flags are supposed to limit which symbols in the library are available to programs that dynamically link to the library.

Unfortunately, the feature is not implemented correctly for many platforms. Rather than leaving symbols out of the dynamic symbol table, it just removes debugging information for the non-exported symbols (so not only does it not work, it also makes your code harder to debug ...).

sej: that sounds a lot more like the NPL than the MPL. The MPL does not give any special privileges to Netscape, the only mention of Netscape in the license is that they may publish new versions of the licence, similar to GPL.

In fact, the license policy states that new original code should be licenced under MPL/GPL/LGPL tripple license. I am not quite sure why an LGPL rendering library (such as the LGPL portions of raph's libart) should be a problem -- such a license sounds consistant with the license policy for "new non-original source files".

Wrote a short Samba patch to fix up display of the print queue when using the version of LPRng that came with RH7.3 as a print spooler. One of the new features in that version of LPRng was that it leaves one or two jobs in the print queue marked as done (apparently this was done for accounting purposes).

Unfortunately, Samba was not expecting to see jobs marked as “done” (it assumed that jobs marked “active” were being printed, jobs with a numeric rank were queued, and all other jobs were paused). This was causing a lot of confusion at the office, as Windows would not realise that print jobs had completed.

tromey: I have found automake to be a very useful tool over the years, especially when you take its constraints into account (portable make, shell, etc). Within the GNOME community, my biggest problem has been having to explain myself every time I use a feature not found in 1.4.

Many of the hackers are not even looking at the recent 1.6 releases because their packages break with them. The irony is that the parts of their Makefile.am's that break are usually work arounds for bugs or defficiencies in automake 1.4 (many of which have been addressed in 1.6). It is depressing to hear people complaining about bugs in old automake while refusing to upgrade (and this is for bleeding edge gnome development; not maintenance branches of the various packages).

GNOME

The 2.0 release has come and gone. It managed to take down widget (which serves www.gnome.org, news.gnome.org and bugzilla.gnome.org). Not being able to access my bugs was a bit of a pain.

The new release looks very nice, and GTK 2.0 is a joy to program. I still need to finish off PyGTK 2.0 though. The articles from Dennis E. Powell and Nick Petreley about GNOME 2.0 have been very surprising. DEP's article was very encouraging and Nick's one almost promoted GNOME :).

Work

Last week, one of the servers died because one of the sticks of memory died. After pulling it out, the system booted fine. It would have been a lot easier to test if I didn't have to open it up to plug a floppy drive in. I now have Memtest86 in the GRUB boot menu. Was pretty easy to set up:

cp memtest.bin /boot grubby --add-kernel="/boot/memtest.bin" --title="Memtest86"

This is the second stick of DDR memory we have had that died; probably due to overheating. As the server has 5 IDE ribbon cables, I might look at getting rounded cables which Jaycar is stocking these days.

Been playing with XSLT a bit recently. It is quite a nice transformation language. I have been porting the gtk-doc DocBook -> HTML conversion program to use xsltproc (with a customisation layer over Norman Walsh's XSL stylesheets), rather than Jade (with a customisation layer over his DSSSL stylesheets). Took a little while to learn what I needed, but the end result looked fairly elegant.

While working on the customisation layer, I even found a simple bug in the base stylesheets.

EggMenu

The menu merge code is mostly working now. With some help from Anders, almost all the menu merge functionality is working. You can merge and demerge UI files, bind a particular menu item to a different action, and use placeholders.

Toolbars are still left to go. I need to work out how to do the placeholders on toolbars, as the placeholder implementation for menus makes use of (possibly hidden) separator menu items before and after the elements within the placeholder. The separators in GtkToolbar are not widgets, so I will need to work out some other way to handle it.

Went to see AOTC today. It was a lot better than Episode

1. It was pretty cool recognising some of the buildings I had been to in Seville in some of the scenes.

It was a bit weird that all the clones were kiwis though.

Switched over to GNOME 2.0 on my laptop. It is definitely at the stage where I can use it for every day work. There are a few annoyances, but it is shaping up quite nicely. Libglade is shaping up very nicely, and will probably be go stable soon. PyGTK might take a little longer.

I recently found out that bugzilla.gnome.org has support for new email tech, but it was turned off by default. I turned it on, and the bug mail looks a lot nicer (like my mail from all the other bugzillas, rather than diff -u output).

linux.conf.au 2003

The Call for Papers is out:

http://conf.linux.org.au/pipermail/lca-helpers/2002-May/000109.html

There is also an HTML version on the website, but it doesn't quite match the final version of the CFP (yet).

Beer

Bottled the honey ale today. It will be interesting to see how it tastes in a few weeks. The sweetness was gone, but I could definitely taste the honey still. It should be very nice.

GNOME 2.0

Put out yet another beta of libglade for the GNOME 2.0 beta 5 release which should be comming out this week. I should also make new releases of pygtk and gnome-python as well. I have done a number of improvements to the code generator, so pygtk is a bit more complete. The last gnome-python release no longer compiles with the latest GConf, so it also needs a new release.

Started another batch of beer yesterday. This time I mixed in a kilogram of honey (replacing some of the sugar), so it will be interesting to see how this turns out. The bubbles coming out of the airlock smell fairly different, so it will hopefully go okay.

Merged some patches from various people into my jhbuild build scripts over the weekend. Thanks to jdahlin, it now has support for getting things from other CVS trees. At the moment, we have rules for thinice2, gstreamer and mrproject using this feature.

Menu Code

I moved all my action based menu prototype code into libegg, which is becomming the prototype library hp proposed a while back. andersca might check in some of his new icon list widget soon, which will be good. GTK+ 2.4 should be very good (the 2.2 feature list has already been finalised; it is basically 2.0 plus the multihead patches, and should be available in a month or two).

My menu code should eventually provide menu merge capabilities similar to the UI handler code in libbonoboui, but not depending on any of the corba stuff. It should be extensible enough so that it can be used by things like bonobo. The aim being to allow gtk+ and gnome/bonobo programs to use exactly the same menu code (rather than having to rewrite portions of an app in order to port it to GNOME).