Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 16:04:00 -0500 (EST) From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> To: gnome-announce-list@gnome.org, gnome-list@gnome.org Subject: GNOME Summary, Oct26-Nov9 This is the GNOME Summary for October 26 - November 9. ============================================================= Table of Contents ------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Miguel Wins Award 2) MemProf 3) Report from Japan 4) gnome-db activity 5) developer.gnome.org Feature Articles 6) GStreamer 7) GNOME patch for AbiWord 8) Need New Pixmap Themes Person 9) Bug Buddy 10) Hacking Activity 11) New and Updated Software ============================================================== 1) Miguel Wins Award -------------------------------------------------------------- Miguel was recognized along with Linus as one of the "100 most remarkable innovators under 35" by Technology Review, a respected magazine from MIT. See the link here: http://www.techreview.com/tr100/profile.php3?deIcaza ============================================================== 2) MemProf -------------------------------------------------------------- Owen released an exciting new development tool that should interest all developers using the Linux kernel and the GNU C library (2.0 or 2.1). Have a look here: http://people.redhat.com/~otaylor/memprof/index.html MemProf basically does conservative garbage collection to detect memory leaks. It even has a nice GUI. For the moment, threads confuse it a little bit, but it works great otherwise. Commercial tools to do this cost on the order of $1000 per seat; Owen wrote this in a couple weeks. Go figure. I ran an early version of MemProf on GConf and found 6 serious bugs in an hour or so. All of them would have been nearly impossible to find without this tool. Get MemProf; run it on all your applications, as often as possible. Do it now. ============================================================== 3) Report from Japan -------------------------------------------------------------- I went to Tokyo for a GNU Seminar last week, arranged by the Free Software Foundation. The day after the seminar we held a GNOME BOF as well. There were around 100 people at the seminar, 50 or so at the BOF; lots of interest in GNU and GNOME. Interesting demonstrations I saw included Masatake Yamato's Display GhostScript - which does some cool things - and Yutaka Niibe's port of the Linux kernel to Super 8 (a common embedded chip used in Sega Dreamcast). I had a chance to meet some members of the Japan GNOME User's Group, Steve Baur of XEmacs fame, Masayuki Ida (GNU VP for Japan), Manuel Chakravarty (GTK+-Haskell author), Werner Koch (GPG author), and many others. Everyone was very nice and very enthusiastic; I had a great time, a visit to Tokyo is strongly recommended if you ever get a chance. This is also the reason I missed the summary last week. :-) I put the slides for my GNOME presentation on the web, look here: http://www106.pair.com/rhp/havoc_slides.tar.gz You need MagicPoint to view them, but they may be of interest. Feel free to use/modify/redistribute these slides if you're making a presentation about GNOME. ============================================================== 4) gnome-db activity -------------------------------------------------------------- There's a new version of gnome-db (GNOME database library/applications), and a new mailing list for discussion. If you're interested in databases check out this module and consider subscribing to the list. You can read more here: http://www.gnome.org/gnome-db/ ============================================================== 5) developer.gnome.org Feature Articles -------------------------------------------------------------- developer.gnome.org is running feature articles now, see: http://developer.gnome.org/feature/ The first article is from Federico, on gdk-pixbuf. There are also new gdk-pixbuf reference docs at: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gdk-pixbuf/book1.html ============================================================== 6) GStreamer -------------------------------------------------------------- Erik Walthinsen revealed some interesting streaming media work, have a look at the announcement here: http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/941434104/index_html There's lots of information on the home page: http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/gnome/gst/ He has an MP3 player in only a few lines of code... ============================================================== 7) GNOME patch for AbiWord -------------------------------------------------------------- Joaquin Cuenca Abela has a patch for AbiWord to make it use the GNOME libraries. See his post to the AbiWord mailing list: http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/October/0288.html No news on whether this has been integrated into the source tree. GNOME compliance is welcome news; it could give AbiWord consistent-looking dialogs and session management, among other things. ============================================================== 8) Need New Pixmap Themes Person -------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Hestilow (hestgray@ionet.net) mailed to ask for help on revamping the pixmap theme: <blockquote> The pressing needs of school are pretty much requring me to go on a "coding vacation". So! I need someone to bring themes back from the brink of death. I looked over my code, and apparently, the only code that I'm not embarassed to hand over consists of a header file and some lame gradient implementations. But I assure you I spent a lot of time on that header file :-). All of this plus a bit of work on a themes editor is in cvs module "rcedit". In summary: I want someone to take over this stuff while I'm gone. Thank you very much. PS: Chances are good I will not be replying to email on a regular basis. </blockquote> The pixmap theme needs to be rewritten to use gdk-pixbuf; it can also be made a good bit faster by reducing redraws, I'm told. Mail Richard if you want to work on this. ============================================================== 9) Bug Buddy -------------------------------------------------------------- Jacob Berkman hacked up a bug report wizard. This is pretty cute; it walks the user through the process of submitting a bug report. If there's a core file, it will even automatically extract a backtrace; and it adds itself as the MIME handler for core files in the file manager. (Of course, the backtrace is only useful if the program in question has debugging symbols, but it will at least sometimes work.) Bug Buddy is designed to work with multiple bug trackers; right now it only supports bugs.gnome.org, but should be trivial to get working with other Debian-based trackers (such as bugs.debian.org) and probably isn't hard to get working with Bugzilla systems. Members of projects other than GNOME might want to look into this. ============================================================== 10) Hacking Activity -------------------------------------------------------------- 1,363 commits in two weeks. Module Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per module, during this week) 107 gdk-pixbuf 98 entity 97 gnumeric 85 gnome-core 66 gimp 51 crescendo 50 gnome-libs 49 bug-buddy 45 gxsnmp 44 gtk-- 35 gnome-debug 34 gnome-applets 27 gtkhtml 26 gphoto 26 gnome-pilot 25 web-devel-2 22 gnomeweb-wml 22 beast 20 dr-genius 19 nethack 19 glade-- 18 mc User Score-O-Matic: (number of CVS commits per user, during this week) 86 sopwith 66 unammx 65 jirka 64 jberkman 60 martin 60 jody 59 imain 39 mwimer 39 jrb 34 ole 34 mmeeks 32 wlashell 30 gregm 28 timj 24 kmaraas 24 glaurent 23 hp 22 drmike 22 dcm 20 kenelson 20 eskil The beginnings of a graphics/plot component went in to Gnumeric, and the evolution module contains code for the much-discussed Evolution email client International GNOME Support is working on. Lots of work on gdk-pixbuf and the next version of gnome-libs, as well as the next gnome-core. ============================================================== 11) New and Updated Software -------------------------------------------------------------- Something like 40 new/updated applications... gmt - GUI for kernel module management Gnonews - news reader gnomeching - I Ching Gnomba - Samba browser Vget - network download tool gbox_applet - mailbox watcher sawmill - nice window manager for GNOME bug-buddy - bug report wizard Gnetutil - ping, traceroute, etc. GUI gnome-ttt - Tic Tac Toe gnome-chess - Chess GUI elknews - newsreader GProc - process list yank - notes and TODO list irssi - IRC client GtkExText - enhanced text widget GMiniCPPEnvironment - sort of a micro-IDE for C++ GPeriodic - periodic table GMasqDialer - masqdialer client gnome-ttt-3D - 3D tic-tac-toe GnOpenGL3ds - OpenGL 3DS file viewer graphtool - BMP graphs from Gnumeric files Pygmy - mail client written in Python GMatH - math environment Gnome Toaster - CD creation suite gnome-db - GNOME database access pasmon - network monitor Pan - GNOME/GTK newsreader Gmail - mail client GStreamer - multimedia library teatime - tells you about teatime Gnorponocal - RPN calculator with a really weird name screem - Web site creator/editor gEdit - text editor Gseq - sequencer Morpheus - 3D model viewer GCO - GNOME Comics Organizer LinPopUp - talks to WinPopUp over Samba GnomeHack - Nethack port Gnome Network Buddy - network utility program think - makes outlines Quest - role-playing game MemProf - memory profiler Tapelab - tape labels PicView - image viewer ggv - postscript viewer gimon - ISDN monitor Eye of GNOME - image viewer QuickRes applet - switch video resolutions Tim - web browser (ambitious!) graham - organizes important documents for you See the software map on www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for more information about any of these packages. =========================================================================== Until next week - Havoc