Still no cvs access. I’m trying with the cisco card again but mysteriously can’t log into any hotspots even with that. I’m getting pretty sick of the network settings stuff but I don’t know if it’s the fault of RedHat or linux in general. In the past I have had to manually delete config files to get stuff working but they seem to be duplicated in three different places. Adding and removing PC cards generally mucks up all the settings, because it tries to remember stuff instead of scanning on every bootup. I don’t see why I should have to edit /etc/modules.conf just to delete some alias crap that isn’t true anymore. My only consolation is that I know it would be even worse under Windows.

This lack of connection is killing me. I can’t even push things forward via email because everything depends on stuff that’s stuck on my hard drive. I have had so little time for my projects lately, but at least I could work offline and upload stuff occasionally during the past few weeks. But now I can’t even carry out the least of my responsibilites.

Meanwhile I have a crushing and demoralising schedule at work which leaves me without any extra time or energy. I hate ClearCase as much as I can possibly hate any software. It is as crappy as everyone ever said it was. Anyone who thinks it is acceptable does not have experience with anything else that isn’t as crappy. It’s been a long time since a piece of software has made me wonder whether I would actually feel better if I drove my fist through the screen. This is not good.

For gtkmm, this kind of problem was supposed to be avoided by having two maintainers, but danielk has been totally off the radar for months and doesn’t reply to emails. There are lots of regular contributors but no obvious new maintainer (nobody to review patches and bugs), so I guess I am tied to that for now whatever the cost.

One bright spot is that Bowie Owens has been doing incredibly good, sensible, work on orbitcpp, and lots of it, and it looks like he can take over maintainership. I spent several hours here and there last week doing a big simplification of the stubs/skels/common confusion but that work is still stranded on my hard drive.

Bryan Forbes is also making good progress with gnome-vfsmm, but he’s only just got involved and he’s still learning about gtkmm so I can’t hit him with too much responsibility just yet.

I’ve offerered a few times to step down from the GNOME release team to make way for someone with more time and resources, but they haven’t taken up the offer. And according to the JFDI principle, I’m not confident that some stuff would get done without me. That’s generally a mistake.

So, I plan to do my best for the GNOME 2.4 release cycle with the aim of mostly disappearing afterwards, leaving stuff documented so that everything works without me.

It’s been difficult enough to survive during the past year, let alone be properly involved with GNOME. I’ll be in Dublin next week for GUADEC but don’t expect me to be enthusiastic or constructive. I’m doing what I can.

GNOME on the other hand is doing great. It’s vital and lively and focused and making great progress.