There are some events that make you quite happy. On Monday, I pinged my favorite brazilian hacker to start triaging our list of project ideas for the Google Summer of Code. I didn't want to do this alone, and it was time to do it since the student application period was about to start. Lucas then appeared on IRC. But we were not only two: Adam, Daniel (who is really German, don't listen to him trying to argue that he's not), Marco and Sandy decided to step up and join the discussion. The amazing thing is that all this process was quite long (something like four hours) but everybody took the time to contribute. That's cool. Really cool.

Since I'm talking about GSoC, I might as well go on and try to get more people involved as mentors :-) Everybody potentially willing to mentor for GNOME should register in the web application as soon as possible, since we're already receiving some applications. And we need to start looking at them and discussing with students now. Also, make sure to subscribe to the soc-mentors-list mailing list, since this is the private place where mentors and administrators can talk about proposals, students, problems, good things, etc. If you're interested in being part of the small team (around 10 people) that will have the last word about which applications we accept, make sure to contact Behdad, Christian, Lucas or me. The easiest way is probably to send a mail to soc-mentors-list.

Oh, maybe some students are also reading this blog? Well, now it's time for you to apply. Go read the small documentation that Clare and Marco (who participated to WSOP and GSoC in the past) wrote. You can also look at those notes from Buddhika who also was a GSoC student. I'm sure every student can find a project he wants to work on. There are so many mentoring organizations that I can't imagine that someone will fail to find something of interest to him. There's GNOME, of course, but if you're interested in GNOME, you might also be interested in Abiword, cairo, the GIMP, Gnumeric, GStreamer, Inkscape or X.org. But that's not all, I'm sure there will be some cool projects being mentored by vim, the XMPP Foundation, or our friends at KDE. Also check out the openSUSE ideas! Woo, maybe there are too many good projects? :-)

I discussed with Baris at the end of last week, and he told me he can't create some buzz around GUADEC because he doesn't have a blog yet. So let me be his slave for a few minutes :-)

First, and that's important, there's the deadline for paper submission which is really soon now: it's on March 30th. In case you don't have a calendar right in front of you, it means this week is the last week to submit your talk. So if you're thinking of talking about your latest great idea at GUADEC, don't wait and send your talk proposal now!

The GUADEC team also worked hard on getting sponsors. This is still a work in progress, but here's a the beginning of the results of this work with a preliminary list of sponsors:

• Gold sponsors: Linux Foundation, Novell
• Silver sponsors: Igalia, Mozilla Corporation, Opened Hand

More are of course coming soon and will be announced in a near future. Many thanks to those five organizations, and congratulations for being the first sponsors! This event wouldn't be so successful without all the sponsors that help us each year, so it's great to see them continue their support of our community.

I think I'm done with my slave status and I can be free again! First, I'm really happy to see that Novell is among the first sponsors to support GUADEC ;-) While it probably doesn't mean anything for a lot of people, it's important to me to see that the company I work for is responsive when it comes to supporting a project I love. Anyway. Don't know about you, but I'm quite excited about this GUADEC. I mean, I can't wait to go to Istanbul, and I'm confident the conference will rock as usual. Why am I so confident? Well, there are so many reasons: lots of great people (and friends!), interesting topics to discuss, lots of fun, a beautiful town, etc. And hopefully, Diego will be there and we'll be able to meet for one of the most important event of all times: our second round of the epic ice cream battle.

vuntz@buildmachine ~/>./bin/create-summaries --output-database ~/data.db
vuntz@buildmachine ~/>python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Sep 21 2007, 22:46:31)
[GCC 4.2.1 (SUSE Linux)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sqlite3
>>> db=sqlite3.connect('/suse/vuntz/data.db')
>>> c=db.cursor()
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from patch where srcpackage = (select id from srcpackage where name = "gnome-panel")').fetchone()[0]
25
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from rpmlint').fetchone()[0]
7120
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from rpmlint where type="not-listed-as-documentation"').fetchone()[0]
6388
>>> c.execute('select count(*) from srcpackage where version < upstream_version').fetchone()[0]
26

Quick answers to some FAQ:

• yes, I know, the UI isn't really user-friendly ;-)
• this demo is really short, more can be done right now. And after a bit more work, there'll be some more data in there to query.
• there are certainly bugs when collecting the data, so I wouldn't trust the returned values. It still gives a rough idea of how things are.
• it's only working on packages where upstream is hosted on the GNOME FTP server. That's mainly for convenience reasons; adding other packages later shouldn't be hard.
• yes, there are lots of gnome-panel patches in our package. I'll look at them in a not too distant future.
• most of the rpmlint warnings (6388 out of 7120 -- this includes some false positives, but still) seem to be related to this bug. The good news is that I attached a simple patch earlier today.

I love my job :-)

I fixed the openSUSE package conventions about .desktop files a few minutes ago. No big change there (see the details of the changes), but it contained some outdated information and some errors. I was especially annoyed by the fact that it was talking about the GenericName key for tooltips instead of the Comment key: because of this, there are some patches in our packages to change the .desktop files to use the GenericName key instead of the Comment one. The page can probably do with some more work to clarify things, and I guess I'll do this in the future.

It reminded me that last year, I contacted someone to change the Fedora packaging guidelines because the example was not a valid .desktop file. Do other distributions have packaging guidelines or conventions related to .desktop files? If yes, please tell me where I can look at them so I can check that they're fine :-)

GNOME and KDE both use a lot of technologies and projects which often falls under the freedesktop.org umbrella (hmm, freedesktop.org umbrella, that's a topic for yet another blog post I have to write; or you can read a french post I wrote last year) , and it totally makes sense for our pojects to help those projects whenever we can. For example, in the past, we've been open about Google Summer of Code projects that were not stricly related to GNOME (or KDE, although I can't speak for the KDE administrators). But for some reason, it never crossed our minds to go a step further and really announce this and cooperate on this. Well, after a brief mail exchange with Thiago, now it's fixed.

So all avahi, ConsoleKit, D-Bus, hal, HarfBuzz, NetworkManager, poppler, etc. (I'm sure I'm forgetting tons of projects) people out there, make sure to read Thiago's mail and to help us improve your projects! You just need ideas for Google Summer of Code projects and also time to mentors students.