Present Perfect

Gnome Stuff

Today I wanted to check out the development version of the Gimp, because I want to try and move as much of the applications I use to the sweet Gnome 2 look. So I dove into garnome again and made the gimp target (without allowing it to build it's dependencies, since I already have those). I checked my Applications menu, and there was an entry there ! Tried it, looks very sweet, a lot better-looking than gimp 1.2. Anyway, I proceeded to drag the entry in the menu to the panel, but it refused.

So I right-clicked on it in the menu, and got an error instead of an option menu. This puzzled me, so I looked for the .desktop file and noticed that the gimp.desktop file was a symlink, and none of the others were. So I thought to myself, this should be an easy bug to fix...

So I went through some of the stages of being a good Gnome developer :

• Check bugzilla - couldn't find any bug referring to symbolic links in gnome-panel
• Check gnome-panel source code - noticed that the error dialog popping up is the result of a call to gnome_desktop_item_new_from_uri
• Tried to use the LXR browser at Gnome's developer site, but noticed that it wasn't providing me with any results
• Checked out gnome-desktop, which seemed to contain that function
• Saw a Gnome-VFS function call that actually seemed to open the file, so checked API docs to see what the options were
• Added an extra argument to the opener indicating that symlinks should be followed
• compiled, reinstalled, restarted gnome-panel

Yay, that worked ! I could drag a launcher to the panel.

It all went downhill from there ;) I checked out the CVS version of gnome-desktop and noticed that the fix I put in was already there ! So I went through the changelog and noticed that Jacob Berkman fixed my bug a month ago. I read through that bug report - it apparently took some time to figure out where the bug was hiding. Well, no patch from me then ;)

So what did I learn from this ?

• Doing bug reports is really helpful in any case
• Some bugs are really easy to fix, and it is worth a fragment of my time to at least investigate if it could be an easy fix or not instead of working around it
• I need to spend more time using Gnome's Bugzilla to actually figure out if the bug I have is already reported or fixed
• I learnt some more of Gnome's internals
• I might have what it takes to actually fix system bugs in a desktop environment.

Best thirty minutes I spent this week in any case !

Vorbis 1.0

chipx86 : There are indeed problems with the vorbis 1.0 packages, as I mentioned before here. I have had some suggestions from people on how to fix them, and they're worthwhile avenues. The question is if it's actually worth the effort in trying to implement this temporary solution before major distros catch up and rebuild depending apps. I might need prodding if you feel this is the case.

Gnome Stuff Today I wanted to check out the development version of the Gimp, because I want to try and move as much of the applications I use to the...