Big post, mostly 2.10 related:
The 2.10 splash competition already has some nice entries but it would be awesome if we could get more- contest closes in a few days- gogogogo!
Bugs update, just sent to d-d-l and g-h. We’ve made awesome progress over last time- thanks to lots of people, but particularly Alex, Kjartan, and Vincent. Basically, there are only seven bad bugs remaining, most of which are old. I pointed out to d-d-l that if someone says ‘you know, you pissed your pants’ ‘oh, no problem, I did that yesterday’ is not an acceptable reason not to change your pants, even if you are Jeff. :) The list, from bugzilla’s list:
bugs with patches or apparently easy fixes that someone needs to Just Do:
- 116814Splash screen doesn’t disappear- basically, we’ve got a mega-long timeout here that makes it appear to casual users (i.e., most of them) that we’re broken, and drives non-casual users out of their skulls.
- 122150 gnome-termnal 2.4.0.1 won’t “redraw” text lines properly- redrawing is broken and has been for a long time. Given that vte is defacto unmaintained, and there is a patch that has been tested for a while now in gentoo, this just needs someone to commit and roll a new tarball.
The bug we have a handle on, thanks to elijah
- 166722gnome_url_show needs to use startup-notification and take a timestamp parameter- basically, this is the ‘when i open a webpage from xchat, the browser never pops to the front’ bug. Given how much work has been put in to fix focus, we shouldn’t be shipping with something that affects external users so much.
Bugs that we appear to have no clue about, but which are high visibility/high dup count:
- 121782applet dies at logout- this appears to be happening to several applets, and may or may not have common cause. It would be great if Smart People ™ started looking at this. Given that the actual user impact is small (it is ‘merely’ embarassing to us) I’d strongly consider punting this one, but c’mon… it makes us look bad.
- 146483Nautilus crashed when I dragged a folder from one place to another. lots of dups, no apparent traction.
- 146075Crash while adding images to desktop- there are a ton of dups here, and it can still be duplicated in 2.9.90, apparently.
- 146297nautilus crashed after some navigating- ton of dups, and alex has a theory, but we need more information. This is a chance for someone to do some investigating and help out.
Overall, this is going to be a pretty kickass release, quality-wise, especially if we can nail these remaining bugs. Just under 1300 bugs fixed in the properly-triaged core (which probably means a lot more actually fixed) and 6400 bugs fixed in total across the entire bugzilla. Pretty nice.
I’m personally trying to spend today on the 2.10 press release, and tomorrow on the livecd for the first time in over a week, but at some point I have to focus on my paper for my class, which is looming right after 2.10 is supposed to be out the door.
DV flamed the board again this morning (with cause) about the lack of traction on the trademark issue, and how it impacts shows. In semi-response, I put up a wiki page for people doing shows. It is just a shell for the moment, but I know there are people who can flesh it out, myself included.
On the TM issue, I’m a little bothered- we’re a free software project, and we let people take our most valuable stuff- our code- and basically do with it as they please. In return, we get people using, contributing, and enjoying participation in GNOME. In contrast, because of mostly[1] hypothetical threats, we restrict usage of the trademark from those people who would do the best things with it. That irritates me.
[1] Yeah, we’ve had some misuses of the foot in the past, but a small number compared to the number of times we’ve screwed contributors who got TM permission too late or were scared to ask about it at all. Of course, if we don’t defend the trademark, we lose it, but if we slop layers of red tape over our volunteers, we lose them too, and I know which is more important to me…