Decisions, Decisions....
I'm not sure whether to politely ask metacity developers to review a simple patch from walters, or to tell Firefox 3 users to flood GNOME bugzilla so you guys realize how many people bug 482354 affects and stop dallying and freakin review the patch. Not many people realize this is NOT a Firefox bug and is instead a metacity bug which explains the lack of duplicates in GNOME bugzilla. In any case, I'll be polite. Metacity devs, please please please review this. It affects every Firefox 3 GNOME user, and Firefox 3 isn't lagging far behind GNOME 2.22 in terms of release schedule...
Czech it out: Firefox 3 Beta 2
For the past 2 months, I've been living in Brno, Czech Republic, visiting our local office. I've had a wonderful time here, and can highly recommend a visit to this lovely country and city. I'll blog more about it at a later date.
As we're going into the holiday season, we're leaving you with a little treat. :-) With a ton of help from Martin Stransky, we now have Firefox 3 Beta 2in rawhide (branded as Minefield). Please help test it out and as always, your feedback is appreciated.
Happy holidays!
Vote for pedro caillon
I'm running for a seat on the Fedora Board, and the polls are now open.
Launch Time
In conjunction with my previous announcement, I am pleased to announce the availability of dev.platforms.linux.
As was pointed out at last year's Firefox Summit, most users of the browsers on Linux get their versions from their vendor, not from mozilla.org itself. As such, we came to an agreement to start letting the distros have more influence on the linux side of things. This list is just one of those avenues. I'll be maintaining the list along with Mike Connor of Mozilla.
What this List IS:
- Discussion of linux integration (with GTK+, GNOME, etc.)
- Discussion of vendor patches
- For building a better upstream community of Linux developers
What this List is NOT:
- Don't file bugs here. They go to bugzilla.
- Security discussions take place elsewhere. This is a PUBLIC list.
Mozilla Corp. to work more closely with Linux distributors
The browser on Linux is currently in a sad state of affairs. Basically, there is a huge disconnect amongst browser distributors. I'm including the Mozilla Corp. here. There's a different set of patches in various distros, in part due to different release criteria between distros, but also due to different criteria with upstream. The "official" builds support everything under the sun (it has to since it doesn't play distribution favorites) but still has shortcomings. For example, it builds against an old libstdc++ and won't run on newer distros such as Fedora Core 6 or the public betas of RHEL5 without tracking down some old compat libraries. All in all, it kind of sucks.
A few weeks ago, I led a session at the Firefox Summit about how to fix this. With input from various people, notably Mike Connor of the Mozilla Corp. and Robert O'Callahan of Novell, in addition to the other members in the crowd, we managed to get together a plan which I think everyone should be happy about.
The big change is that the distros, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell, etc. will now have much more say over what happens with the Linux bits. Key contributors on Linux will start getting more sway. Along with roc, I'll start taking on a bigger role with getting things done upstream and making sure distros are accounted for. This includes making sure we get our patches back upstream, and providing extended support on various branches. For example, Red Hat and Novell are both going to commit some effort into maintaining the Firefox 1.5.0.x line past the current EOL date this spring.
In turn, as more effort is moving into the distro builds, they will start appearing on the download pages. This will require some coordination to do right, but it's a great step I think. Reference builds will still be provided by upstream but they will be less promimently displayed.
Now, some of you may be saying that this solves most Linux issues, but not the Debian issue. I haven't forgotten them. I've also talked to Alexander Sack of Debian, who's put a lot of effort into the Mozilla browsers, about how to make Mozilla upstream be in line with the DFSG and I'm pushing those items back up. So far I've heard positive results, but as all things like this, will take time. Stay tuned for more.
This is a rather short post for now (have to get thru Snowpeak Ruins) and I'll fill in more details when I get some more time to blog. Mike Connor should also be putting some info up on his blog soon, but the message is clear: Linux is becoming more important. Working together with Mozilla, Red Hat, Fedora, and other distributions will bring a better experience to the Linux desktop user.
I'm sorry, we're out of mediums. How about XXL?
Scenario one takes place on the red line near Harvard Square. I overhear two girls dropping words like "Netscape" and "browser" so I snoop. (In my defense, they were hot.) From what I could gather, the one girl had been using school computers and Netscape her entire life and just got a shiny new Windows machine with IE, and so far hated it. She had lots of complaints, and her friend said a friend's boyfriend had started using Linux which had things like Firefox and other things and maybe she should try iy. But she didn't think he had any more CDs left, so they sort of shrugged it off. At that moment, I decided to reach into my laptop bag and hand them an FC6 DVD, and they thanked me as I got off at the next stop.
Scenario two takes place at the Starbucks in Nashua yesterday. I'm working on a few bugs while drinking my Green Tea Lemonade. All of a sudden, someone comes up to me and asks "how are you doing that?" He was referring to my wobbly windows, and other cool desktop effects. He said that looked really exciting, and wanted to know where he could buy it. I reached into my laptop bag and handed him a DVD explaining it was free.
Too bad in both situations, I didn't actually have any FC6 media in the laptop bag I always carry with me. I told the guy at Starbucks where to get it from but he was on dialup still, but he quickly became disinterested at that point. Next week, I'm heading to a conference. Likely without media.
The Road to Seven
I spent a bit of time getting Gecko 1.8.1 prepared for FC7. I suppose they will probably work with FC6 since they were built on an FC6 box, but do not file bugs. There may be issues, but I don't care since it's not in any official place right now. File bugs upstream if you can.
So, let me get this straight. You have the power to become invisible?
I spent some time over the past few days playing with firefox and GCC visibility. After a few issues, on various platforms, I've got working builds. Tomorrow's rawhide (1.5.0.6-10) should take advantage of it. Thus, some extra testing would be appreciated on the builds. I've been using them on both i386 and x86_64 without any issue as of yet but the more eyes, the better. Enjoy.
The Importance of Being Earnest
I'm not going to argue whether it is a feature or not. That whole bit was quite ancillary to my point. I simply wanted to convey the idea that the situation is not as grave as you purport it to be. Harming Fedora's name? Good heavens, you think we're trying to do that? Everything is out there for feedback. Because we like internets.
It seems apparent as an outsider looking in that there's an apparent goal to have new icons for FC6. A noble goal, I'd add. You wanted it in by a certain date. It was missed. That sucks. But getting the first batch in wasn't missed by much. Would getting things in a week or so sooner have assuaged your complaints anyway? Magic 8-ball says not likely.
You also say this isn't being tested. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the whole reason of putting the artwork into Rawhide *is* to get testing. As soon as possible after things get done, they get added to the wiki page or to their respective packages.
The hope is that we get the icons done for FC6. And it is entirely possible, especially with the great contributions that the project has been receiving. We want to do things right. We think we are doing things right. (Apologies to the Fedora Art team for using the collective "we.")
Again, things are not as bleak as you assume they are. People want this to work. We aren't going to ship things exactly the way things are now. That would be silly and I'm not sure what gave you that idea. People are working hard on getting things done for FC6. Scrapping the entire project for FC6 because of a few issues with stars, plusses, and colors on a few icons out of ... hundreds? ... seems rather drastic. File bugs on issues you find, so they can get addressed. There may not be much time, but there is still time for improving things.
Also, for future reference, it's consiglieri.
Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
David, it's not technically a feature. It's data. The feature is being able to display the data in a meaningful manner. Support for new image formats would be a feature. Support for displaying images where they previously were unable to be displayed would also be classified as a new feature. Simply displaying different documents, however, isn't.
Is adding a new language translation a feature? It's new, right? The support for using translations was already there, it's just new data to display is all. Would changing the release notes format be a new feature? No, we already have document viewers that can display these things. I can only imagine the sheer amount of firefox bug reports I would get every time someone created a new web site: "RFE: Please add support for viewing xyz.com." What if the GIMP developers had to deal with feature requests: "RFE: foo.jpg works but only with certain contrast settings."
Yes, there is a lot of new art coming through the pipeline. It is also clear you don't like it. Perhaps if you did, your opinion of the so-called "feature" would be more favorable. However, art is perhaps one of the most subjective areas known to man. While some think Monet and Picasso were genius, others (myself included) can not stand the works. Some people complained about the art in FC5; others loved it. Now when trying to change things for FC6, yet more complaints. But there is hope. Help create (or find people you know to help create) art for the project. Help test and report these issues. Don't make it seem as if the new artwork is being done in an attempt to sabotage the release, though. The Fedora Artwork project is important because it is another way for people who might not be able to contribute otherwise (due to lack of desire/ability to code, for example) an avenue for contributing. We should be promoting it, not attempting to stifle it.
/me goes to get some much needed sleep now....
Title quote: M.C. Escher.
You've Got Red On You
There are some things which would be cool to see happen in real life. For example, I would love to see a kung fu fight break out in the middle of a city square. Sometimes, I'm just plain happy to have a camera with me.
Above sightings took place at approximately 3pm on Saturday at Union Sq. in San Francisco. All travelers to that area are advised to use caution when dealing with the locals.
Pearl Jam
What an awesome concert. I had
great on floor "seats" (we didn't actually use them, everyone was standing, rocking out the entire time). Eddie Vedder
came out early, before the opening act and did an acoustic version of Porch,
to a nearly empty TD Banknorth Garden. Then, My Morning Jacket played (not bad, but not Pearl Jam), and after a
brief intercession, Pearl Jam came on stage and holy crap, the place got full in 2 minutes. Their
live version of Even Flow was awesome. Good times.
This got deleted
But for the original text, it appears ross quoted it all. I didn't know rlove submitted a talk on NM. We had discussed this on-list so it came as a shock to me to learn this, but I pulled my initial post (which you quoted) after learning that. I want GUADEC to have a NetworkManager talk and was rather annoyed that it wasn't going to (or so I thought). If Robert is giving it, I'm cool with that.
Langpack fun
So, for another round of updates, bug 324832 is still not fixed. It causes hassles when updating langpacks, as it spits out really ugly dialogs upon updating if you have one of these bastard langpacks installed. In case this continues to go unfixed, I created a shell script to suck down langpack tarballs and weed out the bad ones. Currently the langpacks that I don't distribute are mk.xpi and ko.xpi.
VPNC64
Yay. I managed to finally get vpnc working on my x86-64 laptop, though it
is just a hack. Disabling -fstack-protector "fixes" it for
me. Packages at http://people.redhat.com/caillon/RPMS/rawhide/vpnc/
for now.
Dear Slashdot
Red Hat did not release anything today. The Fedora Project did. Please to be using the Fedora Logo, not the Red Hat logo. K!thxbye!LOL!!1
iPod with Banshee
So, I finally decided to sell out and buy an iPod video 60GB. Of course, this posed a slight problem for me since Apple doesn't produce a Linux version of iTunes. Long story short, I spent a couple hours last night and got some Banshee packages built against Rawhide. I need to clean them up a bit before I post them to Extras, and make it work with players other than iPod as I was primarily concerned with that last night. That should be fairly easy at it just means creating a couple extra packages and then rebuilding Banshee, but I hope to have them in Extras soon.
Fedora Core Bling
Our Band of Merry X Hackers proudly present: Accelerated Indirect GL X, or
AIGLX for short. Read all about it, and try out the packages yourself. It's a technology preview, so YMMV, but its pretty spiffy once you get it working. Some
highlights include drop shawdowed windows and an awesome minimization effect. Credits go to Soren Sandmann-Pedersen, Adam Jackson, Kristian Hogsberg, and Kevin
Martin. Diana Fong gets credit for the animation mockup. Great work guys!
* me goes back to minimizing windows...
Update: I have been informed that the X hackers are indeed merry. Apologies for the doubt.
Logo
Joshua, I think that the logo is set on being something like outlined at capstrat. But dfong did a few modifications which I think look a lot better, and considering the opposition on the lists to the original design, I hope get seriously considered.
GSource and You
If you maintain a GNOME package, you might want to grep for "\bGSource\b" in your source tree. If you find any of these, chances are you are probably leaking. I've already found 4 GNOME packages that leak using this technique, and had to school jrb on this a bit ago (hopefully he doesn't mind me using him as an example), so don't feel bad if your package has this leak.
Bad (leaks)
GSource *source;
source = g_timeout_source_new (); /* Refcount is at 1 */
g_source_set_callback (source,
my_source_callback,
NULL,
NULL);
g_source_attach (source, NULL); /* Refcount is now at 2 */
When the GSource is removed from its GMainContext, because the timeout executed, or because g_source_destroy () was called on it, etc. the
refcount will be dropped back down to 1, and it will hang around in memory. Make sure to call g_source_unref (source) on your GSource after
attaching it to the GMainContext, like so:
Good (doesn't leak)
GSource *source;
source = g_timeout_source_new (); /* Refcount is at 1 */
g_source_set_callback (source,
my_source_callback,
NULL,
NULL);
g_source_attach (source, NULL); /* Refcount is now at 2 */
g_source_unref (source); /* Refcount back down to 1 */
