The progress on JHBuild has continued (although I haven't done much in the last week or so). Frederic Peters of JhAutobuild fame now has a CVS account to maintain the client portion of that project in tree.

Perl Modules (#342638)

One of the other things that Frederic has been working on is support for building Perl modules (which use a Makefile.PL instead of a configure script). His initial patchworked fine for tarballs, but by switching over to the new generic version control code in jhbuild it was possible to support Perl modules maintained in any of the supported version control systems without extra effort.

I've been doing most JHBuild development in my bzr branch recently. If you have bzr 0.8rc1 installed, you can grab it here:

bzr branch http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.dev

I've been keeping a regular CVS import going at http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/bzr/jhbuild/jhbuild.cvs using Tailor, so changes people make to module sets in CVS make there way into the bzr branch. I've used a small hack so that merges back into CVS get recorded correctly in the jhbuild.cvs branch:

In my previous post, I mentioned using Tailor to import jhbuild into a Bazaar-NG branch. In case anyone else is interested in doing the same, here are the steps I used:

1. Install the tools

First create a working directory to perform the import, and set up tailor. I currently use the nightly snapshots of bzr, which did not work with Tailor, so I also grabbed bzr-0.7:

$ wget http://darcs.arstecnica.it/tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz
$ wget http://www.bazaar-ng.org/pkg/bzr-0.7.tar.gz
$ tar xzf tailor-0.9.20.tar.gz
$ tar xzf bzr-0.7.tar.gz
$ ln -s ../bzr-0.7/bzrlib tailor-0.9.20/bzrlib

2. Prepare a local CVS Repository to import from

As most people probably know, the Gnome project is planning a migration to Subversion. In contrast, I've decided to move development of jhbuild over to bzr. This decision is a bit easier for me than for other Gnome modules because:

• No need to coordinate with GDP or GTP, since I maintain the docs and there is no translations.
• Outside of the moduleset definitions, the large majority of development and commits are done by me.
• There aren't really any interesting branches other than the mainline.

I plan to leave the Gnome module set definitions in CVS/Subversion though, since many people help in keeping them up to date, so leaving them there has some value.

On the gtk-doc-list mailing list, Matthias mentioned that the GraphViz license has been changed to the CPL (the same license as used for Eclipse), which is considered Free by both the FSF and OSI (although still GPL incompatible). This should remove the barriers that prevented it getting packaged by Linux distributions.

Due to the previous licensing, RMS urged developers of GNU software to not even produce output in the form that the GraphViz tools use as input. Maybe that can change now. While the license is GPL incompatible, the GraphViz tools can easily be invoked from the command line, passing a .dot file in, and getting output in PNG, PS, SVG, etc format (or even another .dot file with the layout information added), which is enough for pretty much all uses of the tools.

Mataró

I've been in Mataró (about an hour from Barcelona) now since Sunday, and it's quite a nice place. It is a bit cooler than Perth due to it being the middle of Winter here, but the way most of the locals are rugged up you'd think it was a lot colder. It's great to catch up with everyone, and a number of pygtk developers will be turning up over the next few days for the BOF on the weekend.

Even More Icon Theme Stuff

To make it a bit easier to correctly display themed icons, I added support to GtkImage, so that it is as easy as calling gtk_image_new_from_icon_name() or gtk_image_set_from_icon_name(). The patch is attached to bug #155688.

This code takes care of theme changes so the application developer doesn't need to. Once this is in, it should be trivial to add themed icon support to various other widgets that use GtkImage (such as GtkAbout and GtkToolItem).

Icon Theme APIs (continued)

Of course, after recommending that people use gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() to perform the icon load and scale the icon for you, Ross manages to find a bug in that function.

If the icon is not found in the icon theme, but instead in the legacy $prefix/share/pixmaps directory, then gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() will not scale the image down (it will scale them up if necessary though).

jhbuild

Jhbuild now includes a notification icon when running in the default terminal mode. The code is loosely based on Davyd's patch, but instead uses Zenity's notification icon support. If you have the HEAD branch of Zenity installed, it should display without any further configuration. Some of the icons are a little difficult to tell apart at notification icon sizes, so it would be good to update some of them.

linux.conf.au

The LCA2004 team have put together the conference CD and DVD. Apparently they will arrive in the mail in about a week.

They put the CD contents on the web first, and I was a bit disappointed that the recording of my talk was missing (it does include my slides though). However, when they put the DVD contents up I saw that it included a video recording of the talk, which is pretty cool.

Mail Viruses

The barrage of mail viruses and their side effects is getting quite annoying. In the past week, I've had a gnome.org mailing list subscriptions disabled twice. After looking at the mailing list archive, it was pretty obvious why.

The mail server that serves my account is set up to reject windows executables a few other viruses at SMTP delivery time (so it isn't responsible for generating bounces). Unfortunately, a number of viruses got through to the mailing lists and were subsequently rejected before reaching my account. After a certain number of bounces of this type, mailman helpfully disables delivery.

ViewCVS

After the breakin at the gnome.org web server, the CVS server were moved over to the new server HP donated. However, the LXR and Bonsai tools weren't considered as high a priority, so have not been restored yet.

Since it was easier to set up than either LXR or Bonsai, I set up ViewCVS (with jdub's help), so we now have online repository browsing again. It doesn't provide all the features found in the other packages, so it'll be good to get them set up again too though.

Made some changes to the way "jhbuild bootstrap" works. Whereas previously bootstrap would check to see if each required build tool was installed by the distro and only build the tools that were missing, it now builds all the tools.

If you wish to use the build tools supplied by your distro, it is now recommended that you don't run bootstrap. To perform the "check that required tools are installed" job that bootstrap used to do, you can instead run the "jhbuild sanitycheck" command, which will do these checks and report any errors. The sanitycheck command also checks for other configuration problems as well, such as whether the all the different automake versions will be able to find the libtool macros.

Weather

It has been really hot and humid here for the past few days. While it is not uncommon to have hot weather in Perth, high humidity is quite unusual. It seems to be due to the floods up in the north of the state (they had a report on the news about an 18 person town that had been without a pub for 3 days).

There was a big thunder storm last night, so hopefully things will get back to normal. Unfortunately, it is still quite hot (9:20am at the moment, and its 33°C with 62% relative humidity) and there has been an order preventing people from using air conditioners due to supply problems at the power company.

jhbuild

Had a pretty good response to the jhbuild changes. There was a number of problems I didn't catch during my testing (more that I would have liked). However, I think I caught the last few ones with pychecker.

I suppose the next thing to do is to help the fd.org guys set things up so they can manage their module sets from their own CVS tree. That will make it easier to recommend as a build tool.

Checked in a fairly big set of modifications to jhbuild, designed to make it a bit more modular and the code less messy. I had been working on these changes for a while now, and had been keeping track of them on the jhbuild-ng branch.

Here are a few of the main changes:

Code reorganised into a package

The code has been reorganised into a Python package. Unfortunately this means that the old shell script used to start jhbuild won't work. Rerunning "make install" will fix this though. This will make it easier to extend things in the future.

Mark: the support for building the freedesktop.org X server hasn't been there for a while. It was just added yesterday by Johan Dahlin.

If anyone else is interested in building some of the stuff in freedesktop.org CVS using jhbuild, I wrote some instructions and put them in the wiki.

Red Hat 9

Installed it on a few boxes, and I like what I see so far. The Bluecurve mouse cursors look really nice. It is also good to see some more of my packages included in the distro (fontilus and pyorbit).

Spam

Some spammer has been sending mail with random @daa.com.au addresses in the From: field. So far, I have received lots of double bounces, a few messages asking if we know about the spam, and many automated responses (some saying the message came from a blocked domain!). The Received headers indicate that the mail comes from somewhere else, so there isn't much I can do. I hate spammers.

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.