I worked most of the December time on gtk-doc. After more that a year I released 1.12 and 1.13 on the same day:). Most notable features are probably that now one can have syntax highlighted and xreffed examples and the generated indexes have a prefix detection. That means the index has proper a,b,c sections and not everything under 'g' for for gnome libraries. The best thing - you don't need to do anything, just update your gtk-doc version. Now I hope that someone kindly installs 'highlight' (or 'gnu-highlight') on the server that runs library.gnome.org (or do we need them on build.gnome.org?) so that we get the highlighted docs there too.

Now if you want to do something, have a look at these two commits and do the same in your package. It helps maintenance and it builds faster. If you want even more speedups go for gtk-doc from git head. I managed to tweak the xslt to save a third of build time. I mostly replaced some templates to avoid i18n which the api-docs don't use anyway, but also cached some nodesets.

buzztard

On buzztard I also spent a little time, improving the docs and pushing the test coverage further. I will attack the bullets on the 0.6 roadmap next. Happy new year and stay tuned.

I went over pending bugs and fixed a couple more parser errors. The testsuite is definitely helping. The I also had a stab on one feature request - print warnings for failed xrefs. This would be helpful to fix typos in the doc comments that were intended as links, but don't become ones. It was easy to add the warnings, but unfortunately it produced lots of false positives. This is mainly because gtk-doc also creates implicit links. Almost one week later I had most of them under control and now the amount of false positives is quite low. I pushed my ohloh score by fixing the found issues already in gstreamer core/base and in buzztard. You can do the same in other libs. If noone complains any further I intend to release gtk-doc 1.12 this year still :)

buzztard

I made a nice change to the pipeline graph builder - It now uses a fixed internal format (float 32bit). This allows us to avoid plugging audioconvert elements in wires and machines. Now we plug them only if the machine cannot support the internal format. This gives 7 -> 1 sec speedup for load & play of e.g. Aenathron.bmx.

In general also plain to wav rendering is now quite fast. On my AMD64 @ 1.8GHz the 11:45 min. song renders in 45 sec. and on my Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz it takes 28 sec..

The rest of the month I spent a lot of time on project maintenance, improving the api-docs and writing more test. Regarding the latter, I got the test coverage improved a lot. Writing automated tests for some areas is quite tough though.

Then I also made a small change in the UI. All context menus can now be invoked via a popup menu button in the toolbar above (machine, pattern and sequence view), this makes it more usable on touchscreen devices.

I started the month with upstream bugs work. First I looked into #581873, made a fix and two days later realized that my git checkout was on a stale branch and its already fixed in gtk+-2.18. Next I looked at the mime matching issue that is already plaguing me for a while (#541236). I also have a patch for that and hope that I get green light for it or a review how it should be fixed instead.

buzztard

In buzztard I implemented copy and paste in sequence. I also found our what I did wrong in my clipboard handling code (see my previous post). Dunno what wrong with the old code, but this change made it work:

GtkClipboard *cb
-cb=gtk_clipboard_get_for_display(gdk_display_get_default(),GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD);
+cb=gtk_widget_get_clipboard(widget,GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD);

Next I finally got rid of the gnomevfs hard dependency. It is only needed if you have a quite old gtk to get help working. While testing I noticed that some translations disappear during run time. I made some i18n handling fixes regarding to initialisation and libraries.

I am probably the last one to figure that one has to draw with the 0.5 px offset in cairo to get non blurry gfx. After Matthias post I looked at my vu-meters and voila, I was doing it wrong. Fixes are in svn together with some small optimizations.

After a release it is always not so easy for me to pick what I will work on next. I decided to look into copy'n'paste as this is crippling usability right now. This sounds like a trivial thing to implement, but its not. Its partially difficult because the gtk documentation on that matter leaves a lot to answer. With the help of the sources I got it implemented for patterns. One thing that worries me right now is that I use GDK_SELECTION_SECONDARY instead of GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD (which seems to be the recommended one). In my case I have a custom widget to edit structured data. I serialize the data in a textual form, but use an own mime-type for copying, as its kind of pointless to paste it into e.g. your editor. The mime type thing works. To debug it, I can also provide the data as text and then I can paste it in some text editors. What puzzles me is that if GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD is used, gtk+ seemingly randomly post a GDK_SELECTION_CLEAR in gtk_widget_event_internal() and that clear my copy before I have a chance to paste the data. It has something to do with a "selection-clear-event", but again that's only partially documented and the other related events are not documented at all.

Besides a few bug fixes, I also did more optimisations on song-loading. There are still a few candidates for more optimizations, but some of them require quite substantial refactorings. Some of the improvements I already did were on the gstreamer side and they are now in the official tree (some already in 0.10.25 release and some in the next one).

The buzztard team has released version 0.5.0 "crown of thorns" of its buzz-alike music composer. All modules got extensive improvements over the last release from almost a year ago. Give it a try, join hacking and report bugs.

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