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Fruity

I released Tangerine 0.2.6, which includes some minor bug fixes. Also now that SLED 10 is out, I can do a screencast showing Tangerine running under it. So I did, and you can see it here.

Update: It was suggested to me that a screenshot might be needed too, so here you go :)




The control panel for Tangerine

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Spotlight

Lot many things have happened since my last blog. I am now a full-time Evolution Mail hacker and precisely the New Mail Maintainer for Evolution. Sounds thrilling, ain't it? ;) We are just finished with our SLED10 that we, in Novell, have been working sleeplessly for the past few months and the results are fantastic. Just check out why people love it, here.

Thats the quick update on what I am currently into. Lets run through the various other things, quickly:

LDTP, my passion and a project headed by my buddy, Nagappan, received a Google SoC through GNOME and Prashanth Mohan is already knocking it out.

The SoC proposal consists of three milestones: LDTP integration with jhautobuild, Evolution automation and LDTP Regression suite and Prashanth has started working on the second milestone and tinderbox integration is on the final stages to get upstream. For those interested, the log of a real test, run on the test server provided by Frederic Peters is here and a detailed log is here.

Two students, sp2hari and taggy from NIT, Trichy, spent 6 weeks as intern, as part of NOSIP, work like mad and contributed an awesome tool for LDTP called Record. Record captures the user actions on any application and generates a LDTP test script that can be played back. This makes generating-test-scripts easier - simply, automated test-script generation.

Evolution
After a mammoth effort by the team and the community, Evolution 2.6 is stable and sleeker than its previous versions.

Recently, Phillip Vanhoof came up with the idea of mmap()'ing CamelFolderSummary instead of fread'ing it. We had around 2 hours of discussion and shared my experiences on CamelFolderSummary and other related things that he should consider when implementing mmap(). He has some 12 versions of patches and is close to what I asked for. Kudos!! Phillip.

However, the behaviour of the patch is yet to be analysed on various other scenarios: Couple of them are 1) When messages are deleted, 2) When message flags are changed.. etc.

Moreover, before taking upstream, the patch should be tested on a decent sample size using evolution and all the folder operations should be verified. Also, the patch should give a choice to the user/application to choose between mmap() and fread(). Guess, with said final touches it should make it upstream. Phillip? ;-)

That's all for now.. stay tuned!!

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photos and cover art in ipod-sharp

I’ve been working on ipod-sharp recently to add cover art and photo support. It’s nearly complete now, and I can add and remove art and photos on my video iPod. Another person has tried it successfully on his Nano, so all that’s left to test is a regular iPod Photo. There might be some issues to work out yet with the camera adaptor too. A big thanks to Larry who did the initial work and provided the scary image conversion code :)

I’ve added cover art support to Dopi in svn. It uses Cover.jpg (or cover.jpg or folder.png, etc) if one is present next to the files when you add them. I suppose one of these days I should add a crappy “track properties” window so you can view/change the cover art there.

I’ve also created a patch for Banshee to make it use the new ipod-sharp and sync cover art. To try it you’ll need ipod-sharp and libipoddevice from svn/cvs.

Oh I also converted ipod-sharp to use gmcs. Hooray for generics.

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Apple Sucks

A couple weeks ago, I spent some time making Tangerine work on Windows. After I got it working, I started looking into creating an installer and all that stuff. Aaron recommended Inno Setup, so I got that and went to work. I pretty quickly had a basic package working, but it needed to handle installing the various dependencies still.

Microsoft has a neat little bootstrapping utility which you can include in your installer to make sure various components (such as .NET 2.0) are installed, so that bit was easy.

The other dependency it needed to install was Apple’s Bonjour, so I start poking around on Apple’s site to see if they have some kind of cute installer for it. I discover that they do, but they require you to get some kind of license from Apple. Ok, how bad could it be? I start to look through it. There is the normal legal crap, blah blah blah, then I hit the real requirements. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that I would need to do the following things in order to distribute my Bonjour-using application (not just their installer):

  • Provide Apple with 2 samples of the application, on physical media, delivered to them 4 weeks before each release.
  • Provide quarterly reports on the number of Bonjour copies distributed in the previous quarter.
  • Use the Bonjour logo on any manuals included with the application

I am sure a more astute reader could probably find more nastiness. No wonder there aren’t any Windows apps out there using Bonjour. If Apple really doesn’t want people to use it, why don’t they just come out and say it? We need to port Avahi to Windows and crush them into obsolescence.

Update: Luis has added that they can also change the software or license at any point without warning and force me to use that. Nasty.

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Recurrence - Mind blowing stuff of iCal - 2

Today I committed my recurrence work in evolution-exchange along with other conduit patches. Now, evolution-conduits can sync against exchange and groupwise (needs testing) accounts.

Following links will take you to those committed changes:
1) Calendar conduit
2) Todo conduit
3) Addressbook conduit
4) Recurrence fix in evolution-exchange

Now, that Eureka thing. Yes, the bug was in exchange-calendar code that reads events from the server. According to MSDN, events have some specific property that has values from 0 - 4, which represents events with master object, without master object, detached instances etc. Evolution-exchange was always querying for events with codes 0 and 1, which made the message not to appear in evolution as it didn't even fetch. Chen fixed this thing today.

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Bug triaging - Part 1

Last week I triaged around 36 bugs in GAL, which is now a retired-component of Evolution. Have to categorize that list of bugs in to fix-for-gods-sake, fix-for-goodness-sake and wont-fix.

Today, triaged around 80 bugs in all including Evolution-conduits, gpilot and Beagle.

Marked around 20 bugs as FIXED/INCOMPLETE/NOTGNOME and 30 bugs to be fixed.
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3rd Top in closing most bugs for last week

I was playing around in bugzilla creating more saved-searches for quicker access to bugs and found my name listed 3rd for closing most number of bugs in last 7 days on Past week's bug activity link in Gnome bugzilla.

As the link for past-week's-bug-activity keeps changing, here is the list of bugs that I closed, includes evolution-conduits, beagle, connector, gnome-pilot and GAL bugs.
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Recurrence - Mind blowing stuff of iCal

The supplemental patch had a new FIXME to support syncing of instances of a calendar event. In simpleton, recurrences. Recurrence in Evolution has always been a nightmare and especially w.r.t individual backends its more than a nightmare. Chen had made quite good contributions for recurrence in evolution-data-server and some of the other backends. My synchronization stuff cannot be close to complete, if I don't have support for syncing the instances of a recurrence. Today, with a determined mind, was looking at the other backends for similar implementation and finally, got the code in place.

Testing is what makes us happy to see our code working. Well, it was working except for a specific scenario in which we have only (a) instance(s) without any corresponding master object. Hugh... I was tired finding out the roots of the cause and finally got to a point where I could say, "Eureka!! I found the reason". Well, thatz it for today and keep watching to know more about that "Eureka" stuff. ;-)
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