Long Overdue Update
I haven't posted anything in a while, but I'm not complaining. The last month I've been mostly busy pretending to be busy. Ok, to be honest, that's not entirely true. Over at Xfce, we have achieved a lot in August:
- We've moved all Xfce repositories (including the goodies) over to Git. Kudos to Brian for doing most of the work.
- All Xfce translation updates are now submitted via Transifex. Thanks to the Transifex developers for all the support and for being such a friendly bunch. It amazes me that Dimitris, the founder of Indifex, is also active on our translations mailing list to support people!
- The migration of the Thunar core to GIO is complete and has been merged into the main development branch. The overall delta was 2.9MB, although admittedly, a big part of that is due to the removal of ThunarVFS, so I can only take credit for about 16,000 of the 24,335 insertions and 6,000 of the 41,356 deletions.
- We've kicked off the Xfce 4.8 development cycle on August 16th. The schedule and all other details are available on the wiki. Xfce 4.8 is scheduled for April 12th, 2010. Expect development releases of the various core components soon!
Other things I've been planning to blog about but didn't have the time to:
- Samuel is still busy setting up Buildbot. With less time than he had hoped for at hands this might still take a while.
- I was provided with a free Linutop 2 in June. I'd like to thank the Linutop company again for this gift! So far, I've only found the time to give it a few test boots but I'm planning to set it up as a Xfce test machine soon. Its limited hardware makes it much better platform than my rather powerful laptop and/or virtual machines for testing the speed and memory demand of Xfce.
- My thesis is progressing slowly. I think I have at least 3/4 finished now. I'll keep you posted about the result. I'm hoping to kick off the six month learning phase for my final exams before October because a friend of mine is already waiting for me. ;)
News Update
A lot of things are going on lately and it turns out I'm way to busy to update my weblog on a regular basis. So, this is just a short post to keep you all updated.
Last two weeks
- I took a new student job at the university, at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, which I love most. I'll be working on haplotyping algorithms.
- I went to Barcelona and had a great time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit overall. Stephan and I were very productive. One evening during dinner we discussed our development and release process and later started writing it down. The result is a beautiful document that still needs a bit of polishing. I hope it'll serve as a good foundation for the development and release process of Xfce in the future. Several others commented on it and it looks like we'll give the proposed concept a shot after we've switched to git and all that.
- Even though the week in Barcelona was great for Xfce, I was disappointed with how it went with regards to the cooperation between Xubuntu and Xfce. I talked it through with Stephan and after I got back, I resigned from my position as the Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison.
At the moment
- I've started to implement the so-called thumbnail management D-Bus specification. My implementation is called Tumbler and it will hopefully start serving thumbnails for other apps soon. I'm planning to use it in Thunar, Stephan has expressed interest in using it in Ristretto and when discussing the specification and the existing hildon-thumbnail implementation, Philip van Hoof told me that Hildon/Nokia might be interested in dropping hildon-thumbnail in favor of Tumbler if it's flexible enough. I'm working on it as much as I can and I'm hoping to do a release within the next few weeks.
- I'm still working on the Transifex installation for Xfce. It's already running but I still need to import all the projects, releases and of course create accounts for maintainers automatically.
- The migration of Xfce to Git is still work in progress. Brian has most of the repository issues sorted out and is now waiting for me to finish the commit mail script. I have two or three possible implementations lying around but I need to have a look at that again.
- Jim needs the documentation repository next week, so I'm about to set it up.
- Our Buildbot server has arrived in Sweden. Today I set up the firewall. Samual is taking care of setting up the Buildbot host VM and other things. We're considering to move a lot of the services not related to development (like the Xfce websites) into separate VMs on that server too, in order to make the current server a development-only machine.
Besides that I'm trying to catch up with the work and personal stuff that piled up while I was away last week. And I really should go and sleep.