Tue 2008/Aug/26

• Predefined desktop items for Nautilus

  Back in the Summer of Code 2007, Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on adding support for predefined desktop items to Nautilus. This is so that system administrators can set up desktop links that will appear on users' desktops. A university could set up an icon to take people to the university's intranet, for example.

  Basically, I'm reviving Sayamindu's patch and bringing it up to date for the current Nautilus. The idea is that you set up a GConf key, /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir, and point it to a directory which holds .desktop files. This kind of indirection through a GConf key is what makes the scheme work nicely for deployments with Sabayon: sysadmins can have predefined items for various groups of users, and select among those by simply changing a mandatory GConf key for each user. This wouldn't be so easy if there were a hardcoded directory like /var/nautilus/global-desktop-items.

  Sysadmins should be able to define mandatory items, which users cannot change or delete, and also "normal" items, which users can tweak or remove. Mandatory ones would be ones like "Company Intranet" or "Link to Helpdesk". Distros could use normal items for their marketing materials; the perenially hacky "Welcome to FooLinux" icons that currently are hard to do properly.

  The problem I'm having is how to make non-mandatory items work. You want this behavior:

  1. The sysadmin defines a non-mandatory item.
  2. The user sees the item in his desktop. He doesn't want it anymore, so he deletes it. Where do we mark this deletion?
  3. The user decides that he wants the item back after all. How does he restore it?
  4. The sysadmin updates the non-mandatory item and he wants it to show up again in people's desktops. How can this override what the user had done?

  I'm leaning toward having two extra boolean values in .desktop files: an X-GNOME-Mandatory and X-GNOME-Deleted. If the "mandatory" value is false, then the user may change or delete the item. For changes, the item is copied from the predefined_items_dir to the user's ~/Desktop and that version is modified. For deletions, the item is copied there as well, but then the "deleted" flag gets turned on.

  If the user wants an item back, he turns on "show hidden files" and those files get shown again. (Or we could hack the Trash to restore the item by turning off the "deleted" flag...)

  If the sysadmin updates an item in the predefined_items_dir, this item will override items of the same name in users' desktops, based on the item's timestamp.

  Does this make sense? Am I overlooking something?

Syndicated 2008-08-26 11:42:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log

Thu 2008/Aug/21

• People who use git-mirror.gnome.org may have noticed that SVN tags don't get fetched automatically when they get their daily fix of updates with "git fetch" or "git pull" (that is, you run "git tag" and it doesn't list new tags that appeared since you did your original clone). Within your repository, take a look at .git/config:

  [remote "origin"]
  	url = git://git-mirror.gnome.org/git/gtk+
  	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
  	fetch = +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*      ### <---- Add this line!

  The first "fetch" line is already in your .git/config and it means, "every time I fetch from the origin, get all the branch heads in the origin's refs/heads and stuff them in the refs/remotes/origin namespace" (i.e. update all the branch heads).

  The second "fetch" line is what you need to add. It means, "every time I fetch from the origin, also get all the tags and stuff them in my own namespace".

  After that, just do "git fetch origin" and all the tags will be downloaded to your repository.

• Mike Wolf has been working madly on rpm2git to make it easier to use. He has made some very cool changes:

  Rpm2git no longer requires you to have an environment suitable for rpmbuild (e.g. specfiles in /usr/src/packages/SPECS, patches in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES). If you have a single directory with a specfile and patches, you can simply run rpm2git on that.

  You don't need to have all the BuildRequires from the specfile, either.

  Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to mess with your $PATH anymore nor install helper scripts. Rpm2git now works out of the box after "make install".

  All of these changes are now merged in the rpm2git repository.

Syndicated 2008-08-21 11:23:00 (Updated 2008-08-21 18:06:09) from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log

Thu 2008/Aug/14

• Sometimes Oralia boils water in the kettle, and adds a stick of cinnamon to make an infusion. The other day I heard the kettle boiling and I thought, "time for some green tea!". I didn't notice that the water was actually cinnamon, and made my tea as usual.

  Well, hot damn, green tea made with cinnamon water turned out to be *good stuff*. I think I could grow an addiction to this.

• Labels for RANDR monitors

  When you configure multiple monitors, it is useful to know which physical monitor corresponds to each element in the configuration GUI. Both KDE and MacOS display cute labels on each monitor.

  I implemented pretty much the same thing for GNOME, with the addition of color-coding. Hello, sexy:

  

  This is in the following Git repositories (look at the monitor-labeling branches in all of them, and also tray-icon-rotation for gnome-settings-daemon):

  • gnome-desktop
  • gnome-settings-daemon
  • gnome-control-center

  This is just awaiting approval from the the release team to be committed to SVN :)

Syndicated 2008-08-14 12:56:00 (Updated 2008-08-15 01:04:52) from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log

Tue 2008/Aug/12

• Why I want to have the children of git rebase --interactive

  Sometimes you are hacking madly and committing often. Your commit log looks like this:

  * Add some fields for a popup menu
  * Create the popup menu
  * Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
  * Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
  

  Then you type make and of course your code doesn't compile. So you do one-liner commits, one for each build error:

  * Add missing include gtkmenu.h
  * Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
  * Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
  * Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
  

  But you don't want you submit all of those patches upstream! You only want to send perfect patches which are either additions or refactorings to the upstream code. You don't want the maintainer to know that you are a fallible human being who forgets include files and variable declarations; instead, you want him to believe that you are a coding god who sends a perfect series of patches every time.

  git rebase --interactive allows you to pretend you are better than you really are. This is a good thing.

  We have 8 commits in total (4 "good" ones that don't compile, and 4 "embarrassing" ones that are little fixes). So, run git rebase --interactive HEAD~8. This means, "let me fix any fuckups since 8 commits ago".

  Git will drop you in an editor where you edit this:

  pick ab365cf Add some fields for a popup menu
  pick 2478bac Create the popup menu
  pick 9180ffe Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
  pick a6c2467 Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
  pick 289cf1a Add missing include gtkmenu.h
  pick 378ac2b Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
  pick 821ac6f Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
  pick 24acf67 Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
  
  # Commands:
  #  p, pick = use commit
  #  e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending
  #  s, squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit

  Now let's reorder the lines there, and replace some pick commands by squash. I've put in some comments about what each moved line does.

  pick ab365cf Add some fields for a popup menu
  squash 289cf1a Add missing include gtkmenu.h
  # Oops, forgot to "#include <gtk/gtkmenu.h>" to have a field declared "GtkMenu *popup_menu"
  	      
  pick 2478bac Create the popup menu
  squash 821ac6f Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
  # Oops, while creating the menu items I forgot to declare my menu_item variable
  
  squash 24acf67 Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
  # Oops, while creating the menu I also missed an argument to this function (how couldn't anyone?)
  
  pick 9180ffe Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
  
  pick a6c2467 Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
  squash 378ac2b Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
  # ... and I also mistyped popup_menu in a signal handler

  When you are done, save that temporary file and exit your editor. Git will rewrite your commit history so that you have a clean log, with no commits like "fix this little thing". When you send that patch series to the maintainer, he'll have an easier time reading your code, and he'll be amazed at your meticulousness.

  The important thing here is to do one commit per compilation error. Then it's very easy to reorder your commits, where you squash each fix with the corresponding "real" commit.

Syndicated 2008-08-12 14:50:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log

Fri 2008/Aug/08

• Two-stone handicap for me on a 9x9 go board, and the birthdayful HPJ still manages to kick my ass by twenty-something points.

  They must have put something in the cake, as I had two big slices while HPJ had a single tiny one.

Syndicated 2008-08-08 10:50:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log