jd:/dev/blog

It's been a while since I blogged about something. So here's a bunch of things I've done the last month.

Holidays

Well, I've been in holidays one week. :-P

awesome

There have been a huge number of changes between 3.3 (released in June) and 3.4 (almost relesed). I wrote a small but very useful object layer on top of Lua, which adds a class/object system a bit like gobject. I've also replaced all the hooks by per-class/object signals. Finally, the awesome Lua basement are cleaner than they were before, and the extendability is improved. How nice.

We're trying to release 3.4 (rc2 should be out soon), but the development pace is a bit slower than a year before. We're basically almost 2 months late on what was our previous release rate. Not a big deal however.

I've started working on 3.5 slowly. It gonna get amazing new features too.

Google Summer Of Code 2009

I've mentored Mariusz Ceier on XCB GSoC. He worked on adding Xinput2 and XKB extensions. And he managed to do this. His work should be imported ASAP, the discussion has started on XCB maling list last week.

In exchange, Google offered me (and to every mentor) an awful blue t-shirt! Thanks Google! :-P

Since Tuesday, I've begun to work on XCB portage of the startup-notification library.

I've just completed the job, and send a bunch of patches to the XDG mailing list. My work is available in my startup-notification git repository.

If the patches are merged, which I don't doubt, I'll be able to use this lib into awesome, which would be nice step to the Freedesktop standard compliance I like to make.

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.

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.

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.