my blog

Sunday 9 April 2006

GNOME Goal #2

Weehee! GNOME Goal #1 was a big success, with lots of people helping. Right now, only six modules are marked as to do. Rock! Thanks to, in no particular order: Michael Terry, Ruben Vermeersch, Matthias Clasen, Luis Menina, Luca Cavalli, Tommi Vainikainen, Philip Van Hoof, Christian Persch, Sébastien Bacher, Thomas Thurman, Lucas Rocha, Thomas Andersen, Michael Plump, Christian Kirbach, Przemysław Grzegorczyk and a lot of other people (sorry, I'm sure I'm forgetting to mention someone here). Now GNOME is GOption-powered!

But let's continue. I originally thought it'd be great to have a goal based on features. But Behdad and Christian were great and wrote complete pages for some of the goals, which are some nice things we should really do. So, what's special about this second GNOME Goal? Well, it's a combo GNOME Goal: you get two goals for one. The first one is to install theme-friendly icons, because every application has the right to be correctly themed! The second goal is to help our translators, so they don't have to check out an entire module to add a translation. And it's really easy to do this since you only have to put a LINGUAS file, with some other small changes.

Like for the first GNOME Goal, the wiki pages contain all the informations that you need to complete the goals for a module. And everybody is, again, welcome to contribute! It's easy, so don't hesitate and join all the people patching GNOME!

It seems some people already started working on these goals, so you should definitely try to fix one or two modules as soon as possible, while it's still possible ;-)

[18:17] | [GNOME] | [#372] | [2 comments]

Monday 3 April 2006

Join the fun, join the forums!

I'm not a big fan of forums. Probably because I very much prefer mailing lists. Or Usenet.

But since a few weeks, I'm trying something new: I've registered on the GNOME Forums (and on the french-speaking GNOME forums too) and I'm trying to participate there. I was already nearly convinced I should do it when Claus sent me a (fairly long) mail explaining that it would be great to try the forums. It was a bit hard at first, but I'm starting to get used to using forums (I find they work better for me when there are some RSS feeds).

I have some goals in doing this:

  • help people: it's really important to have good support. I fondly remember the days, when I started wanting to contribute to GNOME: I joined #gnome-help for a while since it was a good way to contribute. Our users will always need some support, and so we need people helping in this area.
  • meet some users: I often hear people saying that the developers are not listening for users, or similar stuff. To be honest, a normal user won't open a bug in bugzilla. But he will post a question on a forum. Using the forums is a great way to get feedback from users, be it negative feedback or positive feedback.
  • figure out if we have (or will have) a great non-technical user community. I love the GNOME community, but right now, it's mostly a community of contributors. We love our users. We want more people to use our software. So why don't we try to create a huge user community, where everyone could feel the GNOME love?

And you, do you have an account on the GNOME forums? You really should!

[19:29] | [GNOME] | [#371] | [4 comments]

Sunday 2 April 2006

Pessulus news

It's cool to see Ars Technica relaying my call for pessulus co-maintainers. I got some replies and I hope to see some rocking patches during the 2.15 development cycle.

Michael worked a bit on pessulus and sabayon to offer some OOo lockdown. Great to see this! I still need to answer his mail, though. I guess we'll probably want to add more and more settings to lock down for various applications, and having all this hard-coded in pessulus will make it hard to maintain in the future. So one big feature I'd like to see in pessulus for 2.16 is making it extendable, so you can just drop a small file in a directory and it will automagically enable you to lockdown some features. Guess what? Rob Bradford is working on this. Isn't it fantastic to have contributors?

If you want to join the fun, take a look at the pessulus plans for 2.16 and profit! Err, have fun, I mean.

[16:40] | [GNOME] | [#370] | [3 comments]

Tuesday 28 March 2006

Go, GUADEC, go!

Olav is right. Let's secretly organise this.

Talking about GUADEC, I just submitted some sessions. The one I care most about is Opening GNOME to new contributors: it's something we should really work on and I hope we'll be able to make it easier for people to join. And I really missed some bugsquashing last year, so what about a GUADEC bug day?

Don't forget to submit a session before the deadline (March 31st)!

[23:36] | [GNOME] | [#369]

Friday 24 March 2006

GNOME Goal #1

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about setting GNOME goals. The feedback I got was mostly positive and I'm sure that if I forget about this idea, some people will blame me ;-)

So what about starting now? What about moving away from popt and using GOption? You can easily help with this goal by simply verifying if some modules are still using popt. And you can even make a patch since it's very easy to do the migration. More information on the goal and how you can help is on the PoptGOption page.

I know this is a small step. But this is really what the GNOME Goals are about: doing small changes, but trying to do them everywhere.

Let's quickly rock on this goal, because there'll be a new goal in two weeks :-)

[17:48] | [GNOME] | [#368]

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by Vincent