Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Big post, mostly 2.10 related:

The 2.10 splash competition already has some nice entries but it would be awesome if we could get more- contest closes in a few days- gogogogo!

Bugs update, just sent to d-d-l and g-h. We’ve made awesome progress over last time- thanks to lots of people, but particularly Alex, Kjartan, and Vincent. Basically, there are only seven bad bugs remaining, most of which are old. I pointed out to d-d-l that if someone says ‘you know, you pissed your pants’ ‘oh, no problem, I did that yesterday’ is not an acceptable reason not to change your pants, even if you are Jeff. :) The list, from bugzilla’s list:

bugs with patches or apparently easy fixes that someone needs to Just Do:

• 116814Splash screen doesn’t disappear- basically, we’ve got a mega-long timeout here that makes it appear to casual users (i.e., most of them) that we’re broken, and drives non-casual users out of their skulls.
• 122150 gnome-termnal 2.4.0.1 won’t “redraw” text lines properly- redrawing is broken and has been for a long time. Given that vte is defacto unmaintained, and there is a patch that has been tested for a while now in gentoo, this just needs someone to commit and roll a new tarball.

The bug we have a handle on, thanks to elijah

• 166722gnome_url_show needs to use startup-notification and take a timestamp parameter- basically, this is the ‘when i open a webpage from xchat, the browser never pops to the front’ bug. Given how much work has been put in to fix focus, we shouldn’t be shipping with something that affects external users so much.

Bugs that we appear to have no clue about, but which are high visibility/high dup count:

• 121782applet dies at logout- this appears to be happening to several applets, and may or may not have common cause. It would be great if Smart People ™ started looking at this. Given that the actual user impact is small (it is ‘merely’ embarassing to us) I’d strongly consider punting this one, but c’mon… it makes us look bad.
• 146483Nautilus crashed when I dragged a folder from one place to another. lots of dups, no apparent traction.
• 146075Crash while adding images to desktop- there are a ton of dups here, and it can still be duplicated in 2.9.90, apparently.
• 146297nautilus crashed after some navigating- ton of dups, and alex has a theory, but we need more information. This is a chance for someone to do some investigating and help out.

Overall, this is going to be a pretty kickass release, quality-wise, especially if we can nail these remaining bugs. Just under 1300 bugs fixed in the properly-triaged core (which probably means a lot more actually fixed) and 6400 bugs fixed in total across the entire bugzilla. Pretty nice.

I’m personally trying to spend today on the 2.10 press release, and tomorrow on the livecd for the first time in over a week, but at some point I have to focus on my paper for my class, which is looming right after 2.10 is supposed to be out the door.

DV flamed the board again this morning (with cause) about the lack of traction on the trademark issue, and how it impacts shows. In semi-response, I put up a wiki page for people doing shows. It is just a shell for the moment, but I know there are people who can flesh it out, myself included.

On the TM issue, I’m a little bothered- we’re a free software project, and we let people take our most valuable stuff- our code- and basically do with it as they please. In return, we get people using, contributing, and enjoying participation in GNOME. In contrast, because of mostly[1] hypothetical threats, we restrict usage of the trademark from those people who would do the best things with it. That irritates me.

[1] Yeah, we’ve had some misuses of the foot in the past, but a small number compared to the number of times we’ve screwed contributors who got TM permission too late or were scared to ask about it at all. Of course, if we don’t defend the trademark, we lose it, but if we slop layers of red tape over our volunteers, we lose them too, and I know which is more important to me…

Boycott flumotion now. It allowed Jeff to show us his ‘anchorman’, which is an assault on all that is good and decent. This cannot be permitted, or more eyes will be permanently scarred.

Nat has competition in the flash-demos-from-desktop (apparently termed ‘screencasting’) area, from Jon Udell (links by way of Tim Bray):

cool, long-ish piece on wikipedia’s umlaut page

shorter demo of interfacing maps.google, javascript, and gps data

If you have 10-15 minutes today, these are very cool.

Another day and year older.

Thanks to everyone who showed up for my small birthday party at Brother Jimmy’s, where I inflicted an ugly Duke game on a lot of non-basketball people. Hopefully Krissa’s cake made up for it, though Krissa herself was sort of disappointed with it.

Had a nice flight home, all things considered- because of more rank incompetence and understaffing on the part of US Airways, I nearly missed the flight, but once that was out of the way the flight was just about ideal- first-class because of the other screwups, perfect connection in pittsburgh, and my luggage made it despite the very, very short time from when I checked in to when the plane took off.

Hopefully actual work tomorrow- need to catch up in classwork and start writing. Was good to see some churn in my inbox about the showstopper bugs but there is still a lot of work to be done there.

I couldn’t say this to the unfortunate people who I dealt with this week, because I’m sure they were dealing with a lot of unhappy people this week and they weren’t at fault, but US Airways sucks and I will never, ever fly them again if I can ever avoid it. Bottom line is that I got to Miami 14 hours later than I should have and am leaving it 18 hours later because they can’t get their act together. How a company with so many overbooked flights can be broke I don’t know, but wow…

Didn’t help that I managed to run into a 4×4 this morning with my forehead. The swelling is going down, but man… not fun.

Board meeting yesterday was pretty productive- spent a lot of time talking about guadec, and a lot of time talking about finances. We are closer to understanding our overall financial picture, and as a result we were able to kickstart the GUADEC trip planning earlier than we could last year. Hopefully more attendees as a result.

Have been chilling with the ‘rents in Miami. Silly stupid gorgeous here, pics later. Went to the coconut grove arts festival today with krissa and then with my dad, after taking krissa to the airport. Definitely fun- we might try to make it back next year. Very casual, fun atmosphere- picture your local county fair, complete with barbecue, popcorn, etc., except with pretty good art in the stalls instead of farm animals. Most of it we couldn’t afford, of course, nor did we have space for it, but we did get a small raku pot/vase that was really cool.

Have started to get a lot of feedback on the liveCD; am still trying to wrap my head around that, board mail, and 2.10 release email. If you’ve emailed me about the liveCD, in particular, please accept my apologies- I’ll probably not get back to it until I get back to Boston on Thursday, since I can’t get it on a CD until then.

As part of one of the 2.10 threads, I was pleased to note that we’ve closed over 1200 bugs in core gnome apps since 2.8.0 was released. Still very worried about the 21 bugs in the showstoppers query, though.

On the subject of HST, I think fafblog, as usual, said it best:

HUNTER THOMPSON IS NOT DEAD. Don’t believe their filthy lies. Giblets saw the Good Doctor with his own two eyes just a few hours ago, heading north in the White Whale. He said he was headed up to heaven to shoot God. “The great bastard’s in season and it’s long overdue,” the Godfather of Gonzo said as he dusted off his elephant gun. “I have full reason to believe they will award me both the head and the tail. Expect me back by the apocalypse.”

I am uploading another liveCD build; details here. Also, I leave for Miami in the morning, so if the upload gets screwed up… well, such is life, someone else can I’m sure rebuild it from the previous release ;)

FWIW, the LWE LiveCD was a success- we cleared in total a little over $200 over the production costs. That money will go towards seeding the next batch. Yay us, and thanks to all the guys at the booth who patiently repeated ‘we’re asking for a small donation…’

Still lots of open issues in the ToDo if people are interested in helping out. Right at the moment, I’m particularly curious as to whether or not anyone is seriously using the hoary 1.9 OOo builds and whether or not we should ship some subset of that instead of the monolithic and slower 1.1 builds. If someone wants to investigate using sabayon to ease configuration, that would rule too- currently I have a script that is poking a bunch of gconf keys. Massive suckage there :)

On non-liveCD matters, I’m beginning to get seriously worried about the length and seriousness of the showstoppers list. I know some of these have been in for a while, but I would not have wanted to release 2.8.0 with them either. If you don’t want to have a serious d-d-l/g-h discussion about potentially slipping the release when I get back from Miami, go fix some of these bugs :)

I am sooo wiped today. I was supposed to go to fudcon, and I still might try to make it for the afternoon, but I’m totally wiped from LWE right now, and just laying on my couch and catching up on sleep and email seems really, really appealing. Plus I need to pack for my 7am flight home tomorrow morning :/

LWE in general was awesome- lots of happy GNOME users stopped by and said thanks, got to meet some new faces, see some slightly less new faces, and lots of old faces, of course. Will write more at some point after I’m recovered :)

Very fun day at LWE today, so fun that I’m totally exhausted and this will be a quick entry. Had a great time meeting people (as usual) and seeing old friends. Moved over 60 liveCDs at a requested donation of $5 a pop, both to cover the costs of the printing of the current batch, and to help with the costs of the next batch. I’m confident from the response today (I’d guess only about 1/4 of the people who picked up a CD decided not to give us the donation) that we can do a lot more with selling shirts, liveCDs, etc., at our booths in the future- people are way more than happy to help us out. So we’ll have to give some thought to this before LWE SF this year, but in general I’m excited and really pretty positive about the whole thing, and what it suggests for us in the future.

I’ve known about Hula for a while- really exciting stuff, and I’m excited for Dave that he is involved.

Otherwise, my voice is close to shot already, and it is only day 1. eep. ;)

We’ve made really awesome progress on the liveCD. As I speak, I’m uploading Yet Another Version to http://tieguy.org/misc/gnome-2.10-livecd-0.9.10.iso and http://tieguy.org/misc/gnome-2.10-livecd-0.9.10.iso.md5. If someone can download this and offer to host a torrent seed, that would be cool too- my home PC is getting rebooted too often these days to be a good seed. :/

I’ve made huge strides documenting the stuff I’ve done, all on the wiki under GnomeLiveCd. So this blog entry marks the point where I am ready to have help, also known as ‘the point where I start begging people for help.’ :) This is a really important project if we want to spread GNOME to new users, and for some of the TODO stuff, the barrier to entry is really low- no coding required. It’s a great way for anyone to get involved in GNOME and have a really high impact right away. Some of the highlights of the TODO:

Easy to do for basically anyone:

• Proof and make suggestions for the documents listed under medium priority tasks on the media files page. Don’t let the priority fool you; I wrote these in a rush and I’m sure they could use lots of love.
• Create the doc listed under ‘high priority’ on the same page. Should take someone 10 minutes to write and 20 minutes to verify.

For artists of all stripes:

• Check out the ‘art’ section under the TODO and start brainstorming for 2.12.

For people with a little bit of technical clue and time to download the CD:

• Audit the package list on the CD. There is still a lot of stuff that could be removed to make room for more GNOME stuff, like lots of the python environment. Someone who could go through package by package and test to see what can safely be removed can make a difference in the amount of cool software we can ship.
• Someone with gconf clue could advise on how best to create maintainable gconf settings changes, and create files reflecting the changes I’ve already made.
• Would be real helpful for someone to write the ‘add an icon to default panels’ script Mark was talking about the other day…shouldn’t be too hard, just needs someone with time to write and test it.

There are longer-term projects too, for those who want to get seriously involved- I won’t repeat the TODO too much here, but there are needs for someone who is decent at scripting, input from the docs folks for potential DVD-booklet content, and someone to investigate changing languages on the CD. Again, these don’t need to be GNOME experts necessarily, but people who want to get involved and have the right skills, or are willing to dive in and learn are more than welcome.

If you do some work on any of these, first off, big thanks :) Secondly, when you are done, or hit a roadblock, email me and/or marketing-list@gnome.org so we can get your changes incorporated ASAP- I’d like to see almost daily changes in the CD before 2.10, and hope folks will oblige :)

On that note… I’m off to collapse. Still hoping to cook dinner for Krissa on Valentine’s day, but that hope is fading… we’ll see, I guess :)