Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

Xubuntu meeting is going on in #ubuntu-meeting right now! Come check it out and take part!

Hello Everyone,

Just a friendly reminder of the important Xubuntu community meeting that is scheduled to take place this Wednesday, June 18th @ 2000 (8:00pm) UTC. At this meeting, we will discuss the second draft of the Xubuntu strategy document which is an revised version based on community feedback. This meeting will allow interested parties (Xubuntu developers, Xubuntu community members, Xubuntu users, and anyone interested in seeing Xubuntu being successful) to discuss the document and ways that we can improve it. Suggestions and feedback gathered at this hour long meeting will be used to to produce the final draft.

A second meeting is scheduled for June 21st @ 5:00pm (1700) UTC. At this meeting, we will discuss the priorities and specifications for Intrepid for roughly half an hour to three quarters of an hour. Following, we will all hop on Gobby and work on improving the document collaboratively (particular the standards procedures section). By the end of this meeting, we will have a set of goals for Intrepid and the candidate Xubuntu strategy document.

On June 23rd, I will announce (if all goes well) the official ratification of the Xubuntu strategy document and the official goals for Intrepid. I believe this schedule provides ample opportunity for individual community members to express their ideas, concerns, frustrations, excitement, approval, etc. and will result in a document that is supported and legitimized by its community.

I encourage everyone with an interest in the Xubuntu project to come and participate in these meetings; it is an excellent opportunity to get involved in a great project. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have otherwise I look forward to seeing you all in #ubuntu-meeting on June 18th and June 21st.

Thank you,

So today is my birthday and I’m now 34. It is also my mother’s birthday, and as she’s been having some health issues, I decided to surprise her and drive up to NJ/NY. For the first time the trip went really smooth and it only took me 8 1/2 hours to get here. The very first thing I did, and you’re going to laugh at this, was to buy some Chinese food! You will not believe how bad the Chinese food is in North Carolina (or maybe all the places I’ve tried suck?)! This seems to be a regular trend, as some people who I talked about this also told me that it is really hard to get good Chinese in Florida and Massachussetts.

The weather here is just as hot as it is in NC, and with 95 F ++ you’d have to be nuts to be outdoors! So here we all are getting ready to work on a 750 jigsaw puzzle (a family thing)… I decided to check the status of my translations for the XFCE project using my pet project PyLyglot:

pylyglot –update xfce goodies
pylyglot –needs-update xfce goodies

I was informed that the thunar-svn-plugin and xfce4-datetime-plugin packages needed attention (the UI is not really my focus at the moment).

A few minutes later I committed my own translations back to the repository… now back to some cold beer (I first tried Blue Moon beer when I moved to Chapel Hill) and a puzzle.

Oh, and happy birthday to me!

Obs: Fixed the link to Pylyglot (thanks Fábio!).

You may have already heard about the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam from Jono but I’m excited to mention that Xubuntu and Xfce4 (the awesome, wicked desktop environment Xubuntu ships) will be participating too!

It is nice to see how the Xubuntu (and by extension the upstream) community has gotten to a point where it can participate in events like this.

As everyone knows I’m very involved with the translation efforts of several upstream projects and try to keep up with what’s going on with every single one of them. Starting about 3 weeks ago I realized that I relied too much on statistical information that wasn’t always up to date and sometimes there would be a program that would get newer code (sometimes resulting in changes to the translation strings) and go unoticed. Since I was trying to get XFCE 100% translated, I decided to write up a simple python script to help me keep an eye on those packages… with every featured I added the script became more involved… and PyLyglot was born.

Though I have added a simple UI as a proof of concept, PyLyglot is mainly a command line utility that tells me exactly which packages on a given repository needs attention, as well as which packages don’t yet have translations.

I have many ambitious plans for PyLyglot, getting it to work with other applications to allow the translation of applications (i.e. poEdit, gTranslator, or any text editor), integration with Open-Trans.eu and Bugzilla, as well as a graphical interface that will let you cherry pick which packages to follow, generate reports, and even commit (assuming you have the correct permissions) your work back to the source repository.

The code is still vey much tailored to my own usage and configurations, but I can foresee a lot of changes that will abstract the repository information out and turn it into a plugin-like framework, able to work with other VCSs besides SVN. Why am I publishing this code? To get some feedback, suggestions, help and patches… and with the hope that it will be helpfull to other translators out there. Since this project is fairly young, there’s room for anyone who’s seriously interested in lending a hand.

Hello everyone,

I would like to announce the second mass Xubuntu community meeting which will be held on June 18th @ 8:00pm (2000) UTC. At this meeting, we will discuss the second draft of the Xubuntu strategy document which is an revised version based on community feedback. This meeting will allow interested parties (Xubuntu developers, Xubuntu community members, Xubuntu users, and anyone interested in seeing Xubuntu being successful) to discuss the document and ways that we can improve it. Suggestions and feedback gathered at this hour long meeting will be used to to produce the final draft.

On June 21st @ 5:00pm (1700) UTC a second meeting will take place. At this meeting, we will discuss the priorities and specifications for Intrepid for roughly half an hour to three quarters of an hour. Following, we will all hop on Gobby and work on improving the document collaboratively (particular the standards procedures section). By the end of this meeting, we will have a set of goals for Intrepid and the candidate Xubuntu strategy document.

On June 23rd, I will announce (if all goes well) the official ratification of the Xubuntu strategy document and the official goals for Intrepid. I believe this schedule provides ample opportunity for individual community members to express their ideas, concerns, frustrations, excitement, approval, etc. and will result in a document that is supported and legitimized by its community.

I encourage everyone with an interest in the Xubuntu project to come and participate. If you’re a MOTU-hopeful, MOTU, or core-dev who has been thinking about contributing to the Xubuntu project then now is an excellent time to do so. Xubuntu is what it is because of who we all are.

I look forward to seeing you all on the 18th and 21st of June later this month.

Thank you,

Cody Somerville