Alpha checkpoint

Peter Gordon peter at thecodergeek.com
Tue Jan 27 07:55:58 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 11:32 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> - Empathy. When we switched back to pidgin as the default im client late
> in the F10 cycle, we agreed to reevaluate empathy around the time of the
> F11 alpha, and see if the concerns that prevented it from being the
> default in F10 have been addressed.

One of the major concerns was file-transfer support. That was recently
merged into trunk and is in the current 2.25-series releases. My
understanding is that this is still Jabber/XMPP-only though (Gabble
backend); but one thing that comes to mind is that Haze (and protocols
through it, such as MSN) currently still does not support this well. 

The account-management window has been cleaned up quite a bit too.
Especially, many more of the login details for creating a new account
are guessed based on the account type and automagically filled in.

Setting one's personal avatar image as well as calling with VoIP are
still a bit hit-or-miss, unfortunately. All told, it has definitely made
a significant amount of progress (thanks, Xavier and team!) but it may
still be a bit too rough around the edges, so to speak, to be the
default in F11.

I propose that we *do* have it as default for the Alpha and Beta and if
it comes to a point, similar to the F10 trials, where it's still too
rough, that we can simply fallback (again) to Pidgin for another
release. I sincerely hope that this is not the case, though. ;-)

> - Brasero. Upstream GNOME is moving towards replacing nautilus-cd-burner
> with brasero in 2.26 (following a move that some distros have already
> made). Some integration issues clearly still have to be worked out, but
> we should consider if we want to follow this in F11, or stay with
> nautilus-cd-burner for the time being. Even if we decided to do that,
> we'll have to look at possible conflicts if n-c-b and brasero are
> installed at the same time.

I've not followed the upstream discussion on this as closely as I'd have
liked. However, from what I understand, most of the work has gone into
replacing the backend n-c-b library with libbrasero-media and friends.
It stills seems rather incomplete though. According to the patches in
various upstream GNOME bug reports (such as the one for Rhythmbox [1]),
it merely creates the appropriate playlist file and passes that the
Brasero application.

For the record, I **HATE** [2] having a seperate application for burning
CDs/DVDs (a la Windows and some OS X programs). This type of
functionality just does away with the whole "do one thing really well"
Unix model to me. The applicable capabilities should be inherent to the
application being used for that media. For example, with Rhythmbox
currently, burning a CD is as easy as dragging the songs you want to
their own playlist and then selecting "Create Audio CD..." from that
playlist's context menu (or "Burn" in the main toolbar). 

I would love it if it is intended to be used as a backend library, such
that applications could call to it for CD-burning stuff (a la what I
think libburn tried to accomplish); but it should not be a do-all burner
application in its own right IMNSHO.

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536732

> - CD size. Jeremy informed me that the recent flurry of font packaging
> changes seem to have freed up a considerable amount of space on the
> desktop spin, to the point where we might even consider shipping OOo
> (sans langpacks, of course) instead of abiword. We should look at the
> various options for filling the space we have. 

As beneficial as OO.org may be on the disc, perhaps we could instead add
a few games or "killer apps" which showcase the potential of F/OSS?

Though, offhand, I have no idea what those would be...

Thanks, and regards.
-- 
Peter Gordon (codergeek42) <peter at thecodergeek.com>
Who am I? :: http://www.thecodergeek.com/about-me



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