Older blog entries for pvanhoof (starting at number 2)

22 Dec 2004 (updated 22 Dec 2004 at 16:02 UTC) »
Introducting the people behind gnome-schedule

Yesterday I invited Gaute Hope and Kristof Vansant to this advogato-site. They are co-authors of the gnome-schedule module. Gnome-schedule is a userinterface for configuring the crontab and at daemons. In some future Gaute Hope is planning to add support for anacrontab.

If you are interested in scheduling mechanisms, you also want to checkout (the highly unfinished project) Eventuality by Maciej Katafiasz which promises a scheduling mechanism that works like how GConf works for configuration. So events to which you can subscribe to in your applications.

We're planning a first stable release of gnome-schedule very soon. Dag Wieers will probably create Fedora packages for it. It's being written in Python and uses PyGtk.

Personally I started to dislike Python and PyGtk after this first project I made with it. It's not really something for me. I'm one of those developers who like to code with and for the very latests GNOME technologies. PyGtk from CVS offers that, but the distributions weren't using such an unstable version of course. So it has been holding me back lots of times during development, and is has been holding back a packaged release for various distributions. Next time I'll just use plain C or perhaps C++. Maybe C# once it's going to be adopted by the distributions. Other than that doesn't python feel like my programming language. Sorry.

However, it looks like both Gaute Hope and Kristof Vansant liked it for the purpose of creating gnome-schedule. So I guess it's okay as a development environment for many other people

21 Dec 2004 (updated 21 Dec 2004 at 11:10 UTC) »

This is a repost (old nickname nolonger in use) (original posting date was 21 Dec 2004)

Hey wlach! Glad to read that at least one person used that little document. I've noticed indeed that some comments about Ubuntu where added. Which is an addition I like, of course.

So now you got it's code compiled (the code of Evolution) nothing is stopping you from exploring it and perhaps making contributions? I suggest you take a look at the plugins/ directory. There's lots of work todo! The Evolution dudes organise an IRC-meeting from time to times. Hackfests. Join the next one?

Also check out the developer pages for Evolution.

Oh and Damien: I'm very interested in that GnomeMeeting and GAIM integration -topic. What can be done to still get some integration between Gaim and GnomeMeeting going? Or perhaps with other Instant Messaging clients?

My personal opinion on Desktop Integration is that a (new) foundation like freedesktop.org should focus on this subject and get projects to work together.

21 Dec 2004 (updated 21 Dec 2004 at 11:05 UTC) »
Adding calendar exporting features to Evolution

This is a repost (old nickname nolonger in use) (original posting date was 20 Dec 2004)

This must be my first diary/blog ever created. So bear with me, I am not sure what to put here. Hmm, perhaps something about this new EPlugin system of the current Evolution CVS HEAD-tree.

A few weeks ago I got interested in exploring the newest features of the upcoming Evolution. So I decided to checkout the different modules needed to compile it. After I was done I decided to put online a wiki page explaining how to actually compile that Evolution code.

Then I started reading about EPlugins. There's not much information available already so most of the times I dived into the code of the current EPlugins and into the other Evolution code. I really hope more development information about EPlugins is going to become available as the new developer-feature gets more known.

I decided to implement a GNOME Bounty of last year using the existing save-calendar plugin. The plugin already supported saving a calendar in the ics-format. The bounty, however, asks for a comma separated value format. Novell/Ximian hasn't payed me the $300 yet but, thats okay. Surprisingly they (and more specifically Rodrigo) did, however, accepted my patches! Which is actually, for me, my real reward. Thanks Rodrigo!

So with lots of new enthusiasm I went further and implemented support for the RDF-format too. Sooner or later it also got accepted. The resulting RDF-file should be verifiable against the RDF-schema but I haven't yet tested it with a lot calendar-types/records.

When in a few months you right-mouse click on a Task-List or Calendar in Evolution and choose "Save". Most of what you can use and do is what I'm describing here.

Next on my list is fixing the ics-support. At this moment it's writing a single ics-file (calendar.ics or tasks.ics) in a directory while the dialog is letting the user choose a filename rather than a directory-name. And this way it's also not really using gnome-vfs.

For now people using Evolution from CVS can checkout the code for all this here. Actually, I gave you the link which will explain you how to compile evolution from CVS. So everybody: Have fun.

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