context switch

Small Stakes

Tonight I released version 2.17.90 of the GNOME Utilities package.

It’s not just another release: it marks the end of the work on the interactive dialog of the screenshot utility:

Now every command line switch is replicated on the interactive dialog that comes up when you launch the screenshot utility either from the menu or from the command line using the --interactive switch; each setting is taken into account, so calling gnome-screenshot --interactive --delay=5 --window --border-effect=border will change the UI accordingly (this very command line produced the dialog above).

This point release also marks the beginning of the work for the next development cycle; instead on working on the main trunk, I’ll open branches for the features I plan to add to the various components of the Utilities package:

• plugin support for the System Log Viewer; this has already been written by the (great and incredibly patient) Lin Ma from Sun, but it still needs some cleaning up;
• local sources for the Dictionary; as above, there already is a patch but needs to be cleaned up;
• a new save dialog for the Screenshot utility;
• add an area selector for the Screenshot, so you can pick a specific part of the desktop;

I’m also considering dropping the Dictionary applet from the Utilities, as its functionalities are pretty much covered by the plugin of the deskbar applet, and the deskbar applet is considerably more worth your panel space. The only thing that keeps me from removing the applet is that the deskbar applet is written in Python, and this might be an issue for slower machines; I could move the applet out of tree into its own package and let the distributions or the single users pick it up.

What I would really like to do in the next cycle is to revive GFloppy. At the moment, is compiled conditionally and it’s pretty much useless unless you have a floppy drive and the floppy utilities installed (it can use HAL to check for the available drives, but HAL doesn’t have the ability to programmatically format a volume); since not many computers come with a floppy drive anymore, I’d like for someone with HAL knowledge to pick GFloppy up and find a way to make it work with removable devices, like USB or flash solid state memories. Otherwise, I’ll have to consider dropping GFloppy too, as I don’t have a floppy drive anymore and can’t obviously maintain an application I can’t test.

Finally: if you have a small utility you deem useful enough to end up into the Utilities package, send me an email and propose it for inclusion.

The Engine Driver

Here we are again with the Dictionary hacking; I left my development trunk with barely enough time to close crashers and brown paper bags patchs, and now I’m finally able to return working on it.

Here’s an interesting bug, about the poor discoverability of the look up process. First of all: discoverability? Is that even a word? Who the hell filed that bug? Opened by Emmanue… ehr… looks uncomfortably away.

Anyway, linguistic issues aside, the issue is interesting: some complained that the old Dictionary had a BFB and the new Dictionary has, well, nothing - the word is searched by activating the entry. This makes sense if you are typing the word, but it breaks down if you are pasting a word into the entry as you have to reach out for the keyboard and press enter. The idea was adding a “Go” button, removable by turning off a knob inside GConf. Then I realised that the label bound to the entry could be removed in favour of a button with no relief; it would keep the current appearance of the Dictionary while adding the “mouse-only” interaction requested (and by having a mnemonic, you can also activate the entry using the button’s mnemonic tag). It’s an experiment: the bug I linked has a full patch for the button+GConf knob (courtesy of Stephen Cook, kudos to him), so if people are going to throw themselves out of the window, I’ll gladly forget my solution and apply the patch.

Another couple of squashed bugs: you cannot edit a dictionary source and even if you could, the advanced settings do not work anyway. Both these bugs are really missing implementations of existing features: the source editing was mostly in place before the code freeze of GNOME 2.16, while the advanced settings required two widgets (the database chooser and the strategy chooser) that weren’t ready in time for the UI freeze of last January. Now that I have written both widgets and that I have time to finish what I started, the source dialog has been overhauled, and it allows choosing the database and the matching strategy for the chosen source, both when adding and when editing it.

Speaking of the strategy chooser, I’ve added it to the sidebar, and like the database chooser allows you to set a matching strategy for the session, so you can use the default strategy (the same set for the source) or whatever strategies the source supports; I’ll add a “reset and use the default” button, which is also currently missing from the database chooser.

Here’s the real tricky bug: adding the speller widget to the dictionary applet. I thought about it, and how integrating the speller inside the applet, now that we have that widget. While inside the application having a sidebar makes sense, the same doesn’t not hold for the applet, as it would make it really big. For this reason, I added the speller widget (and every other page inside the sidebar) as pages of a notebook; you can switch between each of them using a drop-down menu - effectively making the whole applet work like the application’s sidebar.

As for the new features: four months ago I began hacking on a parser for the DICT file format, which is used to store a database (a single “dictionary” in a dictionary source) for dictd to use. It took a bit to get ahold of the actual format, but once found I wrote a small parser object, modelled on the GKeyFile object used to parse the desktop entry files. You can use it to load the dictionary and the index from data, or from file; you can just preload the index or load everything; you can even begin with an empty object, fill stuff and write it down. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support compressed files - but it should be enough for closing this bug, and work as a base for the StarDict dictionary parser (this I’ll have to write really from scratch, as the C++ parser code sucks horribly).

Finally, from the old-dictionary-feature-ported-to-the-new-dictionary department, the syntax highlighting has come back! Well, not entirely: just the links and the phonetics have been reinstated, and links still don’t work. Links are colored using the gtk-link-color style property, which is also used by link buttons and the like (if your application renders hyperlinks or something like them, please use that style property!). The reason why I disabled the syntax highlighting was that there’s no formal definition for the dictionary syntax: it really can break at any given time - as you’ll see when using it; also, the highlighting code was really messy, so I had to rewrite it and that took time.

All of this is going to hit HEAD this week or so.

There are plenty of other bugs lying around in Bugzilla, though; I hope to have more time during December to look at them and squash some more; but you know the drill: if you have your own pet bug scratch an itch and provide a patch.

Song for Sunshine

I just made two releases for gnome-utils: the first is 2.16.2, another release in the stable branch, which fixes a couple of bugs in Baobab and Screenshot that were also fixed in HEAD and deemed important enough to be backported.

The second release is - finally - 2.17.0, the first release of the new unstable release cycle which will lead to gnome-utils 2.18.0.

The major change in this release is in Baobab, which acquired the new, spiffy, cairo-based ringchart view, thanks to the hard work of Fabio, Paolo, Alejandro and Miguel. Baobab also dropped the search option, which mostly replicated the Search Tool already included in gnome-utils. Baobab user interface was cleaned up, its memory consumption was reduced and many bugs were fixed.

The other modules in gnome-utils got some love, but not much; my development tree still doesn’t build well and it’s not ready for inclusion in HEAD, but I plan to work on it before the next release.

As usual, download, test and file bugs.

Special Delivery

I almost forgot - this should tell you how bad a maintainer I am - but Lennart’s blog reminded me: the ringchart code hit Baobab HEAD:

The ringchart view is really nice - even though I still very much like the treemap - but the real improvements are in Baobab’s user interface, which got streamlined and made simpler. Kudos to both Fabio Marzocca, Paolo Borelli and to all the people at Igalia who worked really hard in order to make the next stable release of Baobab rock.

I did not package a gnome-utils tarball in time for 2.17.1, as I’m still working on my development tree for both the dictionary and the screenshot tool; but since I got a couple of bug fixes (backported to the stable branch) I plan to do a 2.16.2 release this weekend and a 2.17.1 before the end of the month. In the meantime: grab a snapshot from CVS and test away!

Rainbows and Pots of Gold

Of docked windows, bugs and the Dictionary applet

One of the two major UI issues for the new Dictionary was the absence of the speller. Since that has been somewhat fixed, even if it still lacks some polish, I decided to address the other, that is the fact that the Dictionary applet uses a docked window instead of a full window.

The rationale for having a docked window instead of a floating one was that a docked window is alwas at the same place, linked to the applet, so if you want to check a word you can’t possibily “lose” the Dictionary and have to cycle through the window or workspaces list - which is the whole point of having the applet on a panel. If you want a “fire and forget” Dictionary you can always create a launcher on you panel and click on it.

One problem with this rationale is that the dictionaries usually return preformatted text, which is understandable - they should work on ANSI terminals too; but this creates a dilemma: should we remove the formatting from the text, allowing the text view widget to reflow its content without changing the size of the window? Or should we keep the formatting and resize the window?

Docked window should not be resized by the user; I don’t resize the clock applet’s drop-down, or the drawer applet, or any menu: I expect them to change their size according to their content. So, if we want to avoid what could be perceived as a regression by some users and keep the formatting of the dictionary entries, we must resize the window according to its content whenever is possible.

Here comes the bug:

I haven’t been able to hit, let alone reproduce, this bug until a couple of days ago. Actually, I tried again with 2.14.0 and I could not hit it, so I think the issue is much more weird that I’ve thought . Anyway: if you exposed the definition window before searching something, the window would not be resized. The actual fix took less than ten minutes (writing, compiling, adding the stock applet to the panel, killing the applet, launching the newly compiled applet from terminal and hijacking the factory included) and consisted in a couple of lines.

I’ve closed both reports, essentially because inside all code paths that lead to the visualization of the window now take care of checking its size against its content. If you hit this weird bug again with HEAD file a bug about it, but please, please avoid asking that the window should be resizable. The definition window should just work; if it does require the user to change it, it’s a bug.

Of side bars, widgets and UI changes

In related news, I’ve finally been able to spend some time updating Dictionary’s UI; the Speller widget is now embedded into a real side bar (like the one Evince and Totem use, albeit I used my own code), and there’s also a list showing the databases available on the dictionary source used; if you double click on a database, the following queries will be made against that database only (the setting is not permanent: you’ll have to update the source definition for this to happen).

Still, the time I planned to spend and the features I intended to add to the Dictionary (and the rest of gnome-utils) are way below par, as you can see on gnome-utils roadmap. I can mostly blame moving to London and the wedding, but the thruth is that after the feat of rewriting the entire Dictionary (backend, main frontend and applet) in three months I felt a little bit burned out. The real upside, though, is that I can still hack new features like these without spending too much time (the sidebar and the database chooser are the result of 12 hours of hacking, after two months of not touching the code base except for the occasional bug fixing) thinking: “what was I thinking when I wrote this code” (except for the occasional: “hrm, what was I drinking before writing this code”); this means that the rewrite turned out pretty good: compare to adding the docked window inside the applet, a minor feature that required rewriting the entire thing.

Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect

Today I finally did find time to work on gnome-utils. I applied a whole slew of patches that sit in my development trunk for almost a couple of months now, and that I tested locally. The first thing that went is is the speller widget for Dictionary; it’s still rough on the list of words it displays (no separation between results from different databases), but it works nicely: when you activate a row in the list it’ll only search on the database the word was found in. The spinner is gone - replaced by a progress bar in the bottom right of the status bar; still, the Dictionary looks like a web browser in my opinion. Maybe a more radical approach in the design of the UI is needed, or maybe I’m definitely on crack and this is how a dictionary application should really look like.

By the way, since 2.15.0 the “rounded window corners without alpha channel” bug has been fixed in the Screenshot application. I don’t remember if I wrote it in the announcements of the last release.

Thanks to Lin Ma, the System Log Viewer should Just Work(tm) on Solaris; also, thanks to Joe Marcus Clarke, many of the crashers on 64bit platforms should have been fixed. Kudos to both of them. The plan was to refactor and update the code-base, but I’m afraid it’ll have to wait.

Between GUADEC and wedding, I hope to find time to hack on System Log Viewer and Screenshot. Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to release gnome-utils 2.15.3, in time for the GNOME 2.15.3 dealine.

All You Want

this week end I decided to work full time on the dictionary; I ended up fixing a bunch of bugs and RFEs, namely

• no more dialogs in case of word not found
• a visual indicator of progress inside the main window
• the re-addition of the “speller” widget
• themed icons and bugzilla version inside the launcher

the error dialogs have been switched to an inline error message inside the defbox; I’d like to add an icon too, but there’s no direct placement of a pixbuf inside a GtkTextView: if you want pixel-positioning you must use a GtkImage widget.

I’ve added a throbber widget, using the same code nautilus and epiphany use. while I’d like for the “spinner” widget to get into gtk+, I don’t really like the idea of having it on the dictionary UI: it makes the dictionary look like a browser or something, which is not. on the other hand, I don’t know what to use to visually indicate that the dictionary is working and it’s not blocked; if you have an idea (even though code would be better) please let me know.

and, finally, I’ve re-done the infamous speller widget, the list of similar words that comes up when no words have been found. it’s like the old widget, for the time being, but I intend to twist it a little bit more. it remebers its state across sessions (like the whole dictionary does), and I’ll add a knob for disabling it in case you want your own personal grammar nazi on the desktop. <sarcasm>thanks to all the people that bitched about it on bugzilla and never felt the urge to move their collective asses and help instead</sarcasm>. really - if half of the energy some people spend bitching on Bugzilla about missing features could be transformed in electricity we wouldn’t need to make wars for oil anymore.

anyway, here’s the obligatory screenshot:

the code needs to be cleaned up a little bit, and some cvs surgery is needed as I changed some of the layout of the files; I expect to land my development trunk on cvs.gnome.org this weekend.

July, July

veronica mars: I’ve watched the season finale last week and it was awesome; the entire second season was awesome, but last episode was a blast. I’ll avoid any spoiler here, but really you should watch the show if you aren’t - with its gritty and cynical view of the world, with good acting and great storylines; I’m really happy CW confirmed it for another season.

foundation: my application for the GNOME foundation membership has been finally approved; I’ve asked for the ‘cool @gnome.org email alias’ and behdad was really kind enough to set it up, so kudos goes to him as well as the Foundation membership committee.

gnome-utils: work and real life took precedence in the last weeks; so I didn’t release gnome-utils in time for GNOME 2.15.2. Development didn’t stop, though, and you can count on a release in time for 2.15.3. Especially the Dictionary users should track the next unstable release, as it will feature the Infamous Missing Speller Widget, plus a bunch of fixes and other features. I’ll make a blog with screenshots about it soon. By the way, check out gnome-utils roadmap on the wiki and see if there are tasks you’d like to mention, or take up.

GUADEC: My proposal for a tutorial about the recent files and bookmarks architecture has been left out of the core days, and moved to the warm up weekend like the other tutorials; so, if the provisional schedule holds, I’ll give my tutorial at 18:00 on Sunday, right before the GNU/FIFA soccer game - I’ll try to keep the tutorial short.

Now listening: The Decemberists, Castaways and cutouts

Growing Family

I’ve just finished including baobab, the disk usage analysis tool written by Fabio Marzocca (and others), into gnome-utils HEAD. Everything seems to build fine, and make distcheck has just confirmed that gnome-utils-2.15.0 is ready to be released. I plan to give the final touches before the deadline of tomorrow, so that the first unstable release of Gnome will ship the growing family of gnome-utils.

Now Listening: The Decemberists, Picaresque

ChangeLog

moving out: Marta has been in London a couple of times, in these two weeks; she has found a nice house in Crystal Palace, and began to buy furniture and stuff, and preparing it for us to move in. Next week, we’re both going to London and buy the remaining stuff (a sofa-bed, a table for the living room and some chairs to begin with). We should return in Milan for a couple of days on the 4th of May, as we must sign documents and papers for the marriage, and actually choose its date (it’ll be in July, probably).

gtk+ recent: the merge went well; on the gtk-devel list, Murray Cumming pointed out a couple of issues; most notably, the lack of integration with the GtkUIManager. The plan was to add a placeholder tag to the markup used to build the UI, but I really don’t like this approach anymore: it’s inherently messy. As a replacement, I coded up in a couple of hours a new GtkAction subclass: GtkRecentAction; when bound to a menu item tag, it creates a new submenu hooked to a GtkRecentChooserMenu; when bound to a toolbar item tag, it creates a GtkMenuToolButton like the one Gedit uses for the Open toolbar button. Unfortunately, I still can’t see a way to hook up an inlined list of menu items. Well, I suppose I’ll have to file a bug to the HIG and have it changed to use submenus for the list of recently used files.

gnome-utils: good news everyone: I’ve asked Fabio Marzocca for his permission to include into the gnome-utils package the fine disk usage tool called Baobab that he wrote; he agreed, and work is underway to clean up the code and hook it up to the gnome-utils build, in order to have it ready for the 2.15.1 release. Also, work is underway to add Solaris support to the system log viewer, and I’m fixing up a bunch of open bugs for the dictionary, including the re-addition of the “speller tool” (the list of matching words showed if no definitions were to be found).

Gnome-utils 2.13.95 - “Escape Velocity”

Seems like I forgot to announce the new release of gnome-utils; actually, this week-end I had a bad cold (I’m not completely cured, though), and standing in front of my laptop made my eyes sore after two or three minutes.

Anyway, the last release before March 15th is out. It should have been 2.13.94 (and it’s advertised as such inside the README and the NEWS files of the tarball, but who reads those files anyway?), but there has been some misunderstanding between the working copy I checked out from CVS in order to build the release and me. Well, it’s not the first time I fuck up something in the release process - and I’ve got the feeling that it won’t be the last.

The release contains just a couple of last minute fixes, like the handling of the transparency of the applet when the panel is set to a solid color and low opacity; also, the applet’s window can be closed using the Esc key.

Go get it and try it out.

Gnome-utils 2.13.92 - Gnome-utils vs. Bugzilla

This evening, before going to dinner with Marta at my parent’s, I did the 2.13.92 release of gnome-utils, codenamed Gnome-utils versus Bugzilla.

Since we have approached the feature freeze, the UI freeze and now the string freeze, it’s mostly a “fix and clean up” release; a couple of nasty bugs were fixed, though, like the not translatable name of the screenshot file name in the screenshot application, or the dictionary applet’s window flicker when toggled. Also, thanks to Paolo Borelli (and his constant checking out of each commit inside the entire CVS using Bonsai) the log viewer preferences code has been cleaned up a bit, making it more solid and reliable.

Unless new crashers or blocker bugs are found, I think this will be the last release before 2.14.0 hits the tarballs; so, please test it and report any bug you should find as soon as possible, so that we can make Gnome-utils better before the next stable release!

Gnome-utils 2.13.91 - Ain’t That a Brown Paper Bag?

The first second β-release of the Gnome-utils package is out!

Fixes for crashers, better error handling, font settings and much more!

Go get it!

Update

Gnome-utils 2.13.90 had a glitch in the build system that resulted in the absence of the translations database in the package; thus I’ve just released the 2.13.91 version of gnome-utils, Ain’t that a brown paper bag, which fixes the glitch.

Roadmap

With the incoming release of Gnome 2.13.90, we are approaching the 2.14 version of Gnome. Now, features are frozen, and soon even changing the UI will require at least two approvals (one from the GUP and one from the release team); so, while we still have a full month for fixing bugs, I think it’s time for some little thinking and planning ahead about the next release cycle of gnome-utils.

The biggest job for the 2.15/2.16 cycle will be the cleaning up of the System Log Viewer. The code-base is a bit messy, but thanks to the great work of Vincent we’ve avoided the Design by Accretion Syndrome; still, even a white space consistency patch would be in order: some lines have a (horrid) three-space indentation, while some other have a tab indentation. So, I’d move everything to a tab-based indentation. The other “cosmetic” clean up is the removal of the dead and/or obsolete calls, the usage of a naming scheme for the classes and functions, and a switch to typed objects (e.g. boxed types and GObject-based types). I’ve already begun some attempt at cleaning up the code base, but this will most likely require to land in a new branch as soon as we release gnome-utils 2.14.

The other job is the implementation of a couple of transport methods for Dictionary, namely the HTTP-based transport, which should allow the connection to a web-based dictionary service; the file-based transport, which should allow the querying of locally available dictionaries; the StarDict transport, similar to the file-based one, but including a C parser for the StarDict format. Regarding this format, I’ve had a look at the C++ library and I seriously think that before releasing some software under an open source licence, a serious check on the code style should be in order; I don’t like C++, I think it’s inherently inefficient and messy, but something like this:

whitespace horror in lib.cpp

should really be closed source software - in order to avoid programmers throwing themselves out of the window after having had a look at it.

One more job would be the re-working of the gfloppy utility, with the addition of the ability to format every removable media (floppies, USB sticks, CD/DVD RW, etc). This will require some updates inside HAL - namely, the volume formatting and partitioning support. I think that, while floppies are becoming more and more rare these days, gfloppy might be reborn into something very useful again.

Finally, the last job for the 2.15/2.16 cycle should be the update of the Screenshot utility. First of all, I’d like to close bug #325708, but the whole bug list should be triaged and updated.

Obviously, I can’t promise that everything will be ready in time for 2.16. As always, patches that will make this happen faster are welcome.

Broken

The next release of gnome-utils, 2.13.90, will make libgdict adhere to the API/ABI freeze, even if it’s not part of the Gnome Developer Platform but only of the Desktop.

The freeze had been in effect since the last release (January 18th), and I planned not to change libgdict API; unfortunately, when writing the support for the document_font_name GConf key, which was introduced in Gnome 2.12 and that should be honoured by any application showing arbitrarily long texts to the user, I noticed that a call to gtk_widget_modify_font to a GtkContainer does not propagate to the containers’s children. The widget the Dictionary uses to display the text of the definitions is, in fact, a composite widget (a GtkVBox) as it needs to hold the text display and the find bar; the inner widgets are held inside a private structure, and are not visible to the outside.

If I wanted to work around this, I would have written something like this function inside the code of the libgdict users:

static void
gtk_container_modify_font_children (GtkContainer *container,
				    const gchar  *font_name)
{
  GList *children, *l;
  PangoFontDescription *font_desc;

  g_return_if_fail (GTK_IS_CONTAINER (container));

  font_desc = NULL;
  if (font_name)
    {
      font_desc = pango_font_description_from_string (font_name);
      g_return_if_fail (font_desc != NULL);
    }

  children = gtk_container_get_children (container);
  for (l = children; l != NULL; l = l->next)
     {
        GtkWidget *widget = GTK_WIDGET (l->data);

	gtk_widget_modify_font (widget, font_desc);
     }

  g_list_free (children);

  if (font_desc)
    pango_font_description_free (font_desc);
}

But it would not have worked; I wanted to change the font of the GtkTextView widget inside the GdictDefbox, while the function above would have changed font for all internal widgets - including the find pane.

Assigning a name to the GtkTextView widget, say “text-display”, by using the gtk_widget_set_name function, and changing the code of the inner loop to something like this:

...
  for (l = children; l != NULL; l = l->next)
     {
        GtkWidget *widget = GTK_WIDGET (l->data);
	const gchar *name = gtk_widget_get_name (widget);

	if (strcmp (name, "text-display") == 0)
          gtk_widget_modify_font (widget, font_desc);
     }
...

I would have avoided the API breakage inside libgdict - but I would also have created a performance bottleneck, since I transformed a constant time operation into a linear time one (from an assignment to a list walk) - plus, I don’t know what happens into gtk_widget_modify_font; also, I would have created a documentation issue, since I now would have to document the widget’s name and hope that nobody would ever have the urge to change the GdictDefbox font - at least, not after having had lunch.

Giving a name to the inner children of a composite widget is always a good practice - it makes handling these kind of situations easier; but between an hackish approach and a breakage of an API freeze, I would rather choose the latter. Hacks tend to get sticky, and you get a design by accretion if you let them stick around enough.

So, I opten for adding a new property to the GdictDefbox widget, called font-name, and its two accessor functions:

G_CONST_RETURN gchar *gdict_defbox_get_font_name (GdictDefbox *defbox);
void                  gdict_defbox_set_font_name (GdictDefbox *defbox,
						  const gchar *font_name);

Which are just proxies for the gtk_widget_modify_font function. Since nobody uses libgdict (it’s been out there only for the folks using Ubuntu or jhbuild), the breakage is really minimal; nevertheless, I feel a bit guilty for not having tested this stuff before, in time for the freeze.

New release of gnome-utils

I’ve just rolled the 2.13.5 release of gnome-utils, code-named Optimized for Size.

This release sports a ton of fixes for Dictionary, which now can remember its size and state across sessions; the usage (in the Search Tool and in Dictionary) of the new, spiffy, faster and lighter GSlice slab allocator from GLib HEAD branch, which means that gnome-utils now forcefully depends on at least the 2.9.1 version of GLib; also, the Dictionary got two new localized dictionary sources, one for French and one for Spanish. I hope to add more of those sources, since it’s really quite easy and having localized dictionaries would make the Dictionary utility even more useful.

The full announcement has been posted on the gnome-utils mailing list, and it’s available here.

Be sure to grab it, test it and bug it.

shell

my request for a SSH account was granted. since Vincent is in the middle of a “continent” switch, he asked me to do the 2.13.4 release of gnome-utils, so here’s to you gnome-utils 2.13.4 - “Ubiquitous X-ray”, the fourth unstable release of gnome-utils!

try it, stress it, bug it!