My involvement with PyGObject

That being said most of my hacking time will be spent on OpenShift related projects and while I had already transitioned out of day to day PyGObject maintainership some time ago, I will no longer have any real time to dedicate to the project (I’m actually learning Ruby right now). To tell the truth, not being able to put any more serious time into the project is one of the major reasons I decided I needed a change. There are a number of other people still contributing to the project but it is sorely in need of a lead maintainer who can do releases, keep people on schedule and ping the right people when bugs languish. I feel PyGObject is in good shape but as it begins to get more uptake bugs fixes need to be committed, edge cases corralled and the last mile needs to be traversed. I will still hang out in #python on GIMPNet and can be persuaded to look at patches or even write a few if you ping me and are nice.

Jobs

With me leaving the Fedora team there is now an opening for someone to join the team. They are looking for an all around FOSS rock star who can work in a number of different areas such as packaging, desktop and web development, and any number of miscellaneous skill your would encounter with any FOSS project. The main responsibilities would be maintaining, improving and integrating our infrastructure tools such as Fedora Community Packages web app, Bodhi update tool and Fas accounts system as well as developing tools to make it easier to contribute to Fedora. Most of the tools are written in Python so being a Python expert is a big plus as well as having worked as part of a team on any major open source project. If that sounds like fun to you send me your resume (I get a bonus if you get hired).

OpenShift is also expanding so if any of these jobs look more like your speed feel free to mail me also.

As of now we have mostly been talking about introspection as a way to hook up existing GObject libraries to scripting languages but one of the most powerful features of Introspection is the ability to write your own C libraries inside your scripting project.  You may wish to do this for speed, or perhaps there is a feature that is not yet directly bindable via introspection.  While it is trivial to write one of these small libraries the devil is in the details and having a tutorial around would help people to dive in and play around.  What I am looking for:

• Setup – show how to setup a makefile or even a setup.py file to compile a simple library, gir and typelib files.  Make sure the build env installs all the files to the correct locations and even has a way to test changes without installing
• The C example 1 – show how to implement a simple function that takes simple input and returns output
• The C example 2 – show how to implement different types of functions including multiple output functions and memory managed types
• The C example 3 – show how to implement a gobject class with properties and other gobject features
• The Vala examples – show how to do the above in Vala
• Advanced topics could include callbacks

I’m pretty sure there may already be some Vala examples running around but the point of these tutorials would be to teach a scripter who is somewhat familiar with compiled languages how they could add lower level functionality to their project with out too much pain.  Are you up for the challenge?  Feel free to add a subpage to the PyGObject wiki.

I would like to thank the Gnome Foundation for sponsoring travel and hotel as well as space during the Desktop Summit; Openisums for supplying us with space after the Summit was over; Nemein for the excellent Fondue dinner; Collabora for the Africana food that I had to miss due to the equally excellent cocktail party at Kat and Dave’s place; and KDE for the yummy Vietnamese lunch.

Much has been sewn and much has been grown, but now it is time to go.  Another successful hackfest is in the books and now the hard work of building on our achievements begins.  But first, some beer.

First let’s examine why this is is an issue.  In order to become a member of the Foundation one must prove they have worked on significant pieces of GNOME and have two references to back them up.  A lot of people I know balk at even going through this first step because as far as they can see there is little benefit to becoming a member.  I try to remind them that voting is an important benefit.  During my tenure as a Foundation Board member we saw this as an issue and tried to promote Foundation participation by those in the GNOME Community.  Among other things we required people receiving funding from the foundation to apply for membership at some point in the future.  However the problem still remains that being a member constitutes a voting ballot once a year (1 and a half years during my tenure due to realigning  election years) and little else (there is the occasional smaller ballot).  A foundation member also has to renew their membership once every two years.  So if a member has to think about Foundation process once a year and membership process once every two years it is easy for membership to laps until a member finds themselves in the quandary I now find myself in.  To further exacerbate the situation it is a known issue by the membership and election committees that spam filters eat their e-mails and that the only reminders sent out are the exact same e-mails.

So how do we fix this?

Long Term Solutions

1.) Make registration an in person event to compliment the reminder e-mails – one of the things Foundation Members tend to do every year is go to one of the many events the Foundation sponsors.  If there is a registration system their names should be flagged and they given the opportunity to  renew their membership if it is set to expire in less than a year.  This should be an offline form that is processed at a later date as we all know how bad conference networking can be.  This can be a stipulation to organizers for receiving funding from the Board.

2.) Remind people when they are interacting with the Foundation process – Since voting happens every year, why not warn people when they vote that they will not be eligible for the next years vote unless they reregister at some point during the year?

Short Term Solution

All those who were denied a vote and who voted in last years elections should be allowed to reregister for this vote and given a ballot.

One of the big areas we want to address this time around is generating developer documentation directly from .gir files for each of the languages that support Introspection. This means making sure GObject libraries tag C identifiers for translation to the correct language syntax as well as providing a way to override the more complicated sections such as code samples and Interfaces that have been modified to closer fit a given language’s syntax.

Other items on the agenda include finishing up some of the features, such as default values, that have yet to be implemented but make introspected bindings much easier to use.

If you are interested in attending please add your name and contact info to the wiki page along with any agenda items you would like to see addressed. We should be submitting this to the board for approval and arranging accommodations fairly soon so the sooner we get a list of participants, the better.

Come on down and have some fun while we celebrate the hard work that went into this historic release for the GNOME Project.

It is all one big blur

We’ve been busy at the brmlab hacker space for a couple of days now hacking away at PyGObject Introspection.  A lot of bugs have been fixed and some of the biggest GEdit plugins now works quite well thanks to Ignacio.  Martin Pit has been working on porting system-config-printer which touches a lot of the Gtk+ API which he fixes as he runs into issues.  Right now he is working on making GVariants easier to use.  Nud has been hard at work tracking down reference counting issues which no one else wants to touch due to having to deal with two ref systems and a garbage collector.  Simon Schampijer is working on Gdk issues and is readying a patch to fix places where we don’t quite get constructors correct. Sebastian is porting gnome-dvb and Tomeu is unbreaking Cairo in PyGI after the Gtk+ guys decided to wrap Cairo structs in full boxed types.   Lazlo is adding annotations to Gtk+ and reviewing some of the annotations in Pavel’s gobject-introspection branch. I’ve been working on the new PyGI invoke branch which has been going really well but most likely won’t be ready to swap over until after the hackfest.

One of the greatest things about the hackfest is getting the PyGI developers familiar with debugging some of the harder areas of the library.  After this is over in a few more days everyone will go home with a greater knowledge of the different bits that make up the PyGI infrastructure.  This means we can start to accelerate porting and bug fixing of a few apps up to the release of GNOME 3 and then be in a good place to move everything over in the next cycle.

Thanks goes to Collabora for funding our beers which puts us to sleep so we can wake up refreshed the next morning.  The Collabora thank you dinner will be happening tomorrow night.   Also, thanks to the Foundation for giving us the infrastructure for organising such events.  I plan on writing something less formal than the current guidelines so other people can use as another reference to organizing similar events.  BTW, any hackers near Prague should check out the hackspace.  We need one of these in every city there is FOSS developers.