It's officially out: go grab openSUSE 11.0! You can also use the web interface to help you choose what to download and how to download it.

I'm quite new to the openSUSE world but I've seen great progress in the last six months and I'm definitely happy with the work that is going on in the GNOME team. There are many reasons for that:

• many people are willing to help (and when I say many, it also means more and more) in the openSUSE-GNOME community and so useful things get actually done :-) I'm quite confident that we'll have even more contributions in the future thanks to the new collaboration features of the build service.
• there's an ongoing effort to reduce our number of patches: we want to be good upstream citizen and keeping patches can only hurt us in the long term anyway (they require maintenance, after all). This means we're reviewing all of our patches by making sure they have been sent upstream, and dropping them when we consider they're not worth the effort.
• most (I don't dare saying all, but maybe I should) of the development we're doing is being done upstream. Did I mention we want to be good upstream citizen?
• with all this upstream orientation, you could get the feeling that we're not doing anything useful inside the distribution. But we want to get everything polished and well-integrated with the rest of the distribution, and I hope people will agree we're not doing bad in this area.
• oh, and the people are so great. I won't try to describe howcrazy good the atmosphere is -- just join the IRC channel or the list!

The summary could read: great people, upstream work and awesome result.

I wanted to do quite a few things to celebrate this release, but I unfortunately lost my internet connectivity at home, which makes me quite less productive (but it might be good to help cure the addiction ;-)). Anyway, I'll keep those (not so) secret ideas for the next release! Because, you know, I've the feeling that 11.0 was only first step and 11.1 will get some pure love :-)

After Prague (will post about it really soon, I promise :-)), I came back home a few days and didn't even have time to feel home: I'm now in Berlin for LinuxTag. Interestingly, I was surprisingly happy to walk in Berlin after landing earlier in the evening. I'm not quite sure why, but I guess it means I have a positive feeling for the city. Also good to see that I'm having fun speaking (or maybe I should say trying to speak) German, while back in school, this was really something I disliked. I guess that's because I now choose to speak German instead of being forced to do so...

I'm getting quite excited about LinuxTag since it will be my first time attending this event, and I wonder how it will be in comparison of the other big events I know. But from what I've heard, that's a pretty decent event :-) It will also be a good occasion to meet a lot of openSUSE people -- always good to put faces on names. Oh, and I've heard there are some cool openSUSE stickers on the booth, so everybody should come and say hi! Hopefully, there'll also be a good bunch of GNOME friends there (can't wait to see them again), and I'll obviously be glad to talk about GNOME with everybody patient enough to listen to me.

On Saturday morning, I'll give a talk around freedesktop.org and cross-desktop collaboration during the GNOME track. Of course, as usual for me, my slides are... err... not finished yet ;-) But it's nearly there, really: I just need to sit down and put on paper^Wthe slides what is already completely ready in my brain -- it shouldn't take too long...

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 :-)