jd:/dev/blog - xcb

xcb-util 0.3.0 released

jd — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:22:00 +0200

I just released XCB util and announced on XCB xorg-announce lists at Freedesktop.

This version has seen some of the modules totally rewritten, like ICCCM, event, reply or property. It also has a lot more documentation than previous, so I've set up doxygen documentation online.

It was the last step before releasing awesome 3 final… hm hm.

Working on…

jd — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:58:00 +0200

I've been quite busy last weeks, between real life and awesome stuff.

awesome 3.0 final release is getting closer. No more release candidate version should be expected since there's only 9 small patches into master from rc6. Final release should be out real soon now, before the end of the month. Also, the next branch already contains already nice stuff for the upcoming 3.1 version.

I've done some grunt work on XCB also, pushing other patches and fixing padding stuff in XML protocol description. This was very boring, but well, had to be done, so… I did it.

That's all for now. Stay tuned.

Releasing xcb-util 0.2.1

jd — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:02:00 +0200

This morning I put on my Freedesktop hat and go ahead for a minor release of xcb-util.

This is the third release ever made of xcb-util, 2 years after the first one… It really needed some love.

One step further for XCB into Debian

jd — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:11:00 +0200

I've take some time this morning to work on xcb-util packaging. I've mainly urge that work because Sebastian Dröge, the sweet cairo maintainer, agreed to enable the cairo XCB backend (#474353), which requires xcb-util.

The first upload I've made was built from the latest upstream release which is old (i.e. more than one year old). So I've put a git repository in place this morning and packaged the latest git upstream version, with some good patches from Arnaud (upstream+patches branch), that the upstream XCB developers are still reviewing since several weeks: that is the cost to pay for good code quality؟

Thanks to Sebastian, the new xcb-util targeted for unstable was just arrived in incoming that he already uploaded a new version of the Debian cairo package with XCB backend enabled.

Well, that's a very good day for me since it means that building awesome 3 is no more a PITA (hi MadCoder!) since every dependency is available in the Debian archive.

Updating my .plan

jd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:46:00 +0200

I've been on holidays for one week now, breaking my usual workflow. Well, that allowed me to rest and to think about what I'd like to do and things I need to handle during next weeks.

The urgent things this next days will be my primary server replacement. It is currently dying, and I already had to change its power supply twice in a month. Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I do not have any spare piece so if things go wrong again, I'm screwed. I need to collect some money and buy a new server, or maybe get a server if someone have an old or spare one to give me, I do not know yet.

On the awesome front, I'm about to release awesome 2.3, which will be the final minor release of the major branch 2. This will lead me to work on awesome 3 at a slower rate and a cooler pace.

Then, the thing I do not have to hurry for is awesome 3. There's no big problems in awesome 2, and the xcb-util stuff are not stabilized yet. After my gentle yelling on XCB mailing list, it seems that things will move but will slowly. So I do have time to make things right and do what I want on that branch, making bugfix release on awesome 2 if needed. You can read more about futur on my last post about awesome.

All this should give me some more spare time to work on the upcoming Debian release, lenny, which I'd like to work on. Two years ago (my god, time flies), we've done good work with the french cabal squashing critical bugs and I'd like to go back on this and squash asses again.

awesome: from 2 to 3

jd — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:32:00 +0200

Last week I sent a mail about the upcoming developement strategy for awesome.

Long story short; we begin to work on awesome 3, dropping Xlib in favor of XCB, bringing out the first window manager using this bindings (if you do not count the demo one in the source repository ;-)).

Thanks to the amazing grunt work of Arnaud Fontaine, we already have a working version of awesome using XCB, and it works very very well. Better API, better code, and even faster code. That is awesome.

awesome 2.3-rc1 was released this morning so we'll begin shortly to work on the 3 branch and merge it into the master one.