This is the archive for December 2006. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Happy 2007!

Sunday, December 31, 2006 ★ 16:06 ★ Categories Misc, Photography ★ Permanent url

Best wishes for the new year!

Firework

Gnome ChangeLog policy

Saturday, December 30, 2006 ★ 21:12 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Now that Gnome is about to use Subversion for all its source code repositories, it might be worth rethinking the current ChangeLog policy. The situation until now (CVS) is like this:

Add an entry to ChangeLog before committing. This can be done by hand or scripted using prepare-ChangeLog (which also finds out which C functions were affected; pretty useful information).

Issue cvs commit ChangeLog file.[ch] and duplicate the ChangeLog entry as the commit message. You can use copy/paste; I use a Vim buffer myself. This can also be done with some shell scripting using cvs commit -m "`head -n10 ChangeLog`", but it requires some testing to get the number of lines correct.
However, since Subversion supports proper changesets (instead of per-file revisions), the commit message serves exactly the same purpose as the ChangeLog entry, namely the recording of per-commit change messages (instead of per-file). This means it isn’t necessary anymore to duplicate the commit message, which is a tedious and time-consuming job.

So my question is: should we change the ChangeLog policy now that we have a SCM that allows us poor developers to do The Right Thing? Some issues I’ve come up with so far:

Offline logs: This issue was brought up earlier several times, eg. on the Subversion users mailing list and the Mono mailing list. Some ideas:
Perhaps Subversion can be taught somehow to keep a copy of the logs in the local checkout as well, in addition to pristine copies of all files in the repository?
Perhaps some svk based solution?

Perhaps bzr-svn once it matures a bit?
Inclusion in tarballs: ChangeLog files can easily be included in tarball releases. No magic needed. This issue can be resolved quite easily with the simple Makefile.am snippet below (passes distcheck). I use it succesfully for my bzr-managed gnome-specimen project.
```
EXTRA_DIST += ChangeLog
dist-hook:
        svn log -v > ChangeLog.new
        mv -f ChangeLog.new $(distdir)/ChangeLog
```
Using svn2cl is probably better, but since I have no experience using it I have just changed this above snippet to use svn log -v instead of bzr log --short.

The Subversion Epiphany

Saturday, December 30, 2006 ★ 13:31 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Ha! Epiphany is in Gnome Subversion now and builds fine. It seems the Subversion migration worked well! I’ll give some (easy) tips to get you going.

Checkout (if you have svn access):
```
svn checkout svn+ssh://YOURLOGIN@svn.gnome.org/svn/epiphany/trunk epiphany
```
Checkout (anonymous):
```
svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/epiphany/trunk epiphany
```
Last commit messages:
```
svn log --limit 5
```
The migration status is available online at the migration status pages.

Bug reports

Thursday, December 28, 2006 ★ 15:31 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Thanks to our beloved bug-buddy hackers, useful bug reports keep coming in! From bug #390313:

Question: What were you doing when the application crashed?

Answer: calling with my mobile phone

And another one, from bug #389392:

Question: What were you doing when the application crashed?

Answer: Kaffee getrunken

Need I say more?

Update: I tried drinking coffee during a telephone call, but the crashes were not reproducible…

Happy Christmas

Monday, December 25, 2006 ★ 15:19 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

A very happy christmas to all of you!

Excerpt from my christmas dinner menu. Typeset in Poetica (chancery style) with lots of swash capitals, ligatures and fleurons. Full version as PDF available here.

Disabling the screensaver

Friday, December 15, 2006 ★ 13:55 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming ★ Permanent url

Some applications need to disable/inhibit the screensaver in some circumstances:
- For Totem, this needs to be done when a movie is played fullscreen.
- The presentation mode in Evince should also prevent the screensaver blanking the screen (to prevent embarassing situations during presentations).
  Bastien Nocera implemented this feature for Totem some time ago, and it works for both Gnome Screensaver and XScreensaver. Recently, I’ve adapted his totem-specific code to work with Evince as well. This feature will be in the next release. See bug 338889 for details. Right now it’s quite easy to cut and paste it into your own application, since it’s in a separate library. See evince/cut-n-paste/totem-screensaver for more information.
  
  Now, my opinion is this is a typical feature that should have Gnome-wide API, just as the “network status” API recently discussed on desktop-devel-list.
  
  A totally unrelated picture.
  
  Btw, Robert Love, your photo reminded me of his buddies, as shown above on one of my pictures shot in Prague.