Third time’s the charm

While I was in flight over the Atlantic to come back to the old Europe, the awesome gnome release team finally put out GNOME 3. Not only that, www.gnome.org now sports a fresh new look, but most importantly some great new content.

I am of the opinion that the primary measure of success of an open source project is its ability to attract and keep contributors and I think in this regard GNOME 3 is already a success. The changes in the UI – even the controversial ones – managed to revitalize a project that was slowly falling in a drowsy routine, refocusing efforts of long-standing contributors and attracting new forces. At the same time the great efforts spent cleaning up the programming platform provide a future-proof foundation which makes contributing easier and more fun. Time to make patches, GNOME 3.2 is right ’round the corner!

Syndicated 2011-04-07 20:51:01 from Club Silencio

gnome3 / cincinnati

Lots of blogs/flames/opinions about gnome3 on the web lately… but as they say, there is no such things as bad publicity.

I’ll keep my opinions for myself for now, first of all because I have not yet used gnome-shell enough to make an informed evaluation, but most importantly because if I write them down here, 3 years from now people will be able to point out how wrong I was ;) [maybe I should link some of the blog posts explaining why the spatial nautilus - which is gone in 3.0 - was such a good idea]

With regard to gedit, I am really happy to see how things are coming along… up to a couple of weeks ago I was a bit worried about the stability of the upcoming release, but thanks to the great work of nacho, nud, jesse, gregier, j1mc (thanks for working on the docs!) and to the prompt support of gtk+ and pygobject developers in fixing reported bugs, I am now back to using the devel version of gedit for day to day work and I am confident that it will be a good release. Besides, now that even the dependency on GConf is gone, gedit will fit perfectly in your XFCE, LXDE or EXDE desktop :-)

Coming to more important matters, this blog post after almost an year was mostly an excuse to say that I should be in Cincinnati for about a week starting from the 25th of March… if there is any gnomer who would like to meet for a beer just let me know!

Syndicated 2011-03-09 21:34:39 from Club Silencio

New logo

New logo, courtesy of Henry Peters.

New gedit logo

As announced by nacho, we have been looking for a new logo for a while. We had many interesting submissions and iterated through a couple of designs, borrowing ideas here and there. Thanks to all those who sent us their work!

Not only the new logo is already committed, but you can even wear it :)

gedit by pborelli
Create a custom tee shirt using Zazzle

Syndicated 2010-04-07 20:17:36 from Club Silencio

gedit 2.29.5

I just rolled the tarball for the next development release of gedit. This release marks an important milestone, since we completed all the goals we had on our roadmap for 2.30.

In particular this release overhauls the internals of I/O handling in gedit by always using gio for file loading and saving (we only used gio for saving remote files) and by taking advantage of the new data conversion api added by Alex.

For the casual gedit user these changes should be pretty much transparent, since they do not introduce new features except for the ability of forcing different line endings (Window’s CRLF, old MacOS CR and the usual UNIX CR). However since they are affecting one of the most important parts of the gedit codebase we would like to ask anyone running the development version and in particular who uses files with encodings different from UTF-8, to heavily test file loading and saving  and report any problem or regression.

Syndicated 2010-01-25 20:57:18 from Club Silencio

JavaScript in gnome

Being away from home, bored and yet too tired to do something productive, I skimmed through the gnome-shell proposal mail thread on d-d-l and spotted the inevitable debate on the choice of javascript as a scripting language for the shell.

Personally I am not a big fan of js, quite the contrary, but lately I had to use it extensively (though not in gnome related context) and at the end of the day it is a language as any other. I am not saying it would be the one I would have chosen, but once you use it a bit and get to know its idiosyncrasies, you get what you need done and move on with life. After all any programming language sucks, each one in its own special way and some more than others, but they all suck.

Reading in the aforementioned thread the reasons why js was picked I would have been totally satisfied with valid answers like:

• “It’s my project I and pick whatever language I please”
• “Some of the more talented and experienced gnome hackers chose it. Trust them”
• “It is not C++ or perl, so do not complain”

Beside given that javascript

• has good free implementations
• is widely used (not only in general, but at this point also by various big gnome projects)

I do not have any major problems with it. After all we have clean and consistent code bases written using GObject C conventions, I do not see why we should not be able to tame js as well.

That said, some of the rationales provided for choosing it in the above mentioned d-d-l thread really really trouble me.

js has no platform libraries, so we can use our own

What kind of reason is that? First of all when you embed another scripting language you are not forced in any way to use its standard libarary as well. Second, having a good standard library (or a large set of third party libraries) is a good thing: I thought we were focusing on implementing good applications instead of reimplementing and maintaining a “gwhatever” library for every problem in the world.

using js will attract web developers

That is plainly naive. First of all I have never hacked on something because it was written in a language, at most I have learned a language because something I wanted to hack on was written in it. Second learning the syntax of a language is nothing compared to learning library API, tools, workflows etc and even if I have not used js in gnome yet, I am pretty sure they differ a lot from what web developers are used to. Last but not least, I’d prefer to attract a single good developer than a hundred people not willing to invest an afternoon in learning a language/api/tool.

Syndicated 2009-11-05 22:33:49 from Club Silencio