Glom 1.2

Glom logo Glom 1.2 is now out (see the announcement). It has a few new features and less bugs than the 1.0 branch. It should be available in Ubuntu Edgy soon. Glom 1.0 is apparently now available in Fedora 5 and 6, and I expect that to be updated to 1.2 soon.

For Glom 1.4, I hope to finally port to the latest libgda API, and add a dependency on gtksourceviewmm, to do source-code highlighting of Python code in calculated fields and buttons scripts. And hopefully Rasmus Toftdahl Olesen‘s Relationships Overview feature will also be added.

Updates of non-essential stuff in Ubuntu

Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) will be the recommended stable and supported Ubuntu release for a while yet. It only has Glom 1.0.3, though a 1.0.8 version exists with lots of bugfixes. I can understand that a stable version of a distro doesn’t want to add features by jumping to Glom 1.2, but I don’t understand why bugfix updates aren’t allowed. Generally it seems that updates are only allowed for security bugfixes.

Sure, you have to be careful. If Ubuntu updated OpenOffice in Ubuntu Dapper to fix a crasher then they’d have to be very careful that they weren’t introducing new bugs. But nobody is using Glom for anything critical yet, and it’s not in the officially supported repository. Just because an X update broken things once, it doesn’t seem necessary to freeze the Glom version. Of course, I want people to get my bugfixes so I can get more feedback, so I can make Glom good enough to be relied upon.

8 thoughts on “Glom 1.2

  1. You have to keep in mind that all of universe (so, > 10000 packages) is maintained by a relatively tiny group of people, about 30 in total, of which only a handful is really active at any given time.

    Ubuntu syncs from Debian unstable at the beginning of a release cycle (and maybe until upstream version freeze, not sure), so the easiest would be to have the package in Debian. The alternative (and the only alternative after feature freeze) is to find some universe maintainer and tell them to either sync the package from Debian or upload it directly.

    I guess it is too late for edgy now, but this should be doable for the next release. I hope glom will get into Debian soon.

    Michael

  2. Huh, I totally misread the blog entry it seems. My above comment still applies, with the exception that “if some universe maintainer cares for the package, great”, which is apparently the case for glom.

    As for dapper, there is dapper-backports of course, but I don’t know the mechanisms around that.

    Sorry for the noise,

    Michael

  3. Hi

    ubuntu-backports is an additional repository which makes apps from other (newer) releases available. So, what you can do is to push glom 1.2 into edgy and ask for a backport through launchpad. Then, if the package builds correctly, is somewhat stable and meets the backports policy (i.e. no backport of critial apps (like kernel, X, etc) or is a library widely used (like a gnome library)) then it will be included in dapper backports. AFAIK this is the way debian and ubuntu work with stable releases.

    You can get more info about backports in http://ubuntubackports.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

  4. Actually, my understanding is that Glom doesn’t get updated exactly because it’s not in the officially supported repository (universe). AFAIK there has been no non-security updates for universe packages in dapper yet.
    But Michael is correct, man power is the main problem, if you can find someone who care about Glom enough to work on it, there is a chance that 1.0.8 can get into dapper’s update (although I don’t know how high).
    As for dapper-backports, they only backport from edgy, and since edgy is likely going to have 1.1.7, I don’t think 1.0.8 can be in dapper-backports either.

  5. I think the best thing to do is to maintain a set of Dapper packages somewhere and link it from Glom’s official website.

    What you’re saying makes sense, but it’s pratically impossible to adopt a policy like that for the thousands of packages in a distribution like Ubuntu.

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