2007

Tuesday October 9, 2007, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

It's been a really really busy week. I put Mediabar down and played catch-up with Miro and infrastructure.

I fixed (or at least think I fixed) a few UDE-type errors (#8705, #8706, #8699, #8820, #8737), passed a bug to BDK, passed a bug to Chris, and I think I may have passed a bug to Nassar, too.

We didn't previously have any official policy regarding contributions from non-PCF employees. I spent some time putting together a policy for handling code contributions and also for checking code into the SVN repository. I've talked with Ben and Chris about it so far and ironed out some issues. I think it's pretty decent now. https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/TheRules

I spent some time going through all the code and adding GPL/Copyright headers to files that didn't already have them. I haven't done this to XML, XUL, or DTD files--I think I'm going to leave them be. Part of the reason is that there are a lot of them. The other part of the reason is that they're in a bunch of different markups and I'm not wildly psyched about trying to jam GPL/Copyright headers into them in such a way that it doesn't screw up how those files are used in the code.

I finished up an "alpha" version of the timeline script for Bugzilla. It needs some more work and it has some bugs, so it's not quite ready for prime time. I hope to have this done by the end of the week, but finding time to work on it has been difficult.

Dean is talking to contarc/Jay about skinning Bugzilla and making other changes. In order for that to work well, I needed to re-work things so we can manage the changes we're making to Bugzilla better. I spent today fixing my changes to meet the Bugzilla recommended method for changes and checked everything into SVN.

It'll be really nice to have a better Bugzilla, but we need to make sure that it meets the needs of the developers and testers as well as the rest of the community. I've heard a lot of opinions about what it should and shouldn't look like and that concerns me. While we're pushing to get Miro 1.0 and Mediabar 1.0 out the door, I don't think we should be spending gobs of time on changing minor things in Bugzilla unless the changes are necessary to fix some real problem we all agree exists.

On Sunday, Dean, Chris and I met up with Asheesh from Creative Commons and SJ from OLPC and talked about the world as it revolves around Miro and other things. It was really interesting stuff, but also pretty overwhelming. Then we went to a GNOME Summit bar thing.

I'm planning on switching back to Mediabar stuff tomorrow (Wednesday). I need to finish the tab-friendly re-architecture and I need to figure out how to deal with the recent rss-download issue Neil bumped into. Then there's a lot of little stuff that needs to be done. My rough guess is that I'll be working on Mediabar for another couple of weeks with some time spent on Miro and Bugzilla.

I think I'm going to lay low on IRC for the next week--I need to be talking less and doing more. My queue of things to do is starting to get too big for me to wrap my head around and I'm starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.

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