I'll be in Copenhagen from Friday 20th May to Monday 23rd May, so fun folks there should email me. We're staying in a B&B in Christianshavn.
Last time I was there it was GUADEC 2, I had a broken ankle, and it was cold, so I hope to do Copenhagen properly this time.
We've just confirmed details for the GUADEC Party on Monday 30th May. The place looks hip (do you kids still say that?) and perfect for meeting lots of people all together. Drinks until 11pm, and some finger food, are included in the 20 Euros entrance. That's a good deal.
But we're still hoping to find a party sponsor to make it free. If you think GNOME needs to be more fun [1] then this is something you should support, and something you want to be associated with.
[1] Personally I'd never go back to those "fun" days of unstable and undocumented (*cough*bonobo*cough*) APIs, unclear scope, lack of direction, opaque decision-making, reinvention-instead-of-cooperation-with-mozilla-and-kde, and debian-style drawn-out release tensions. Frustration wasn't fun. Getting stuff done is fun. Innovation now means building things, and that was the point for me all along.
I'm trying again after my previous mailman failures. I've learnt that mailman just does not work with virtualhosts, because it hardcodes one user and each virtualhost runs scripts as a different user, and because virtualhosts (because of suexec) refuse to run scripts from common places like /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/.
So I've created a virtualhost (which requires a subdomain, but lists.gnome-ev.de is OK to have anyway) just for mailman and installed mailman from source in the virtualhosts's allowed cgi-bin path.
However, it still complains that it's not running as the www group, even though I configured it from source like so:
./configure --prefix=/srv/www/htdocs/web10/software/mailman --with-cgi-gid=ftponly --with-mail-gid=ftponly --with-groupname=ftponly --with-username=web10
GNOME Deutschland now has a new wiki-based website. Hopefully this makes it easy for the whole community to easily make changes.
I chose MediaWiki and am generally pleased, particularly by the extremely easy install. I considered the moinmoin wiki, as used by live.gnome.org, but it doesn't seem to allow page moves, or show full page history. It turns out that MediaWiki doesn't really move pages either, like Twiki, but it does allow some reorganisation.
Twiki does all these things, but I've found in that past that it's far too difficult to install, and quite complex for users.
I haven't yet figured out how to group pages together. moinmoin and Twiki both let you add sub-pages, though it's a bit odd with Twiki. We could simulate this with filename prefixes, but both live.gnome.org and MediaWiki seem to force the title of a page to be the name (location) of a page, with automatic capitalization. That's also obviously a problem for localisation with mediawiki. But I can see how it makes things simpler for people at first.
Update: Dave Neary pointed out that I'm wrong about moinmoin and live.gnome.org – there is a rename action at the bottom of
the pages. And I remembered the one thing I like most about mediawiki – linking is explcit, so it does not make a WikiWord out
of techy words, or encourage writers to neglect their spacebar.
Christian Hammond tells me those smart people at VMWare are using gtkmm for the UI of their new VMWare Workstation 5, and plan to gtkmm-ize their other products too.
They also took the time to make a test case for a particularly strange libsigc++ bug that I'm glad to have fixed with some template magic.
I'm trying to set up Mailman on our gnome-ev.de server, so we can have some mailing lists. It's not quite working though.
I installed mailman with yast. It's meant to use the web cgi stuff from /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin automatically, but suexec doesn't allow that, leaving a message in /etc/apache2/suexec.log saying "command not in docroot".
So I copied the cgi files to our html directory instead. I had to change their ownership because they seem to be run as our web10 user instead of the mailman or nobody user. Furthermore, mailman likes to know what user it is running as and complains when run as a different user. Changing /etc/sysconfig/mailman should be enough, but only hacking the GID directly into mailmain.cgi-gid seemed to work for me. So now the "WANTED gid 66534 GOT gid 102" web page error is gone.
However, every time we use the mailman cgi pages to change a mailing list it rewrites the files as owned by mailman, making it impossible for the mailman cgi to use them again. So somehow it's running the cgi as web10 while also running them as mailman, or giving file ownership to mailman.
In summary, SUSE is a pain, as usual. Stuff really should just work.
Once again, if you know of any reasonably priced hosters in Germany please do leave a comment. I don't want to maintain a server (I don't want to be a sysadmin) and I don't really want to pay the huge dedicated-server prices.
A last warning for the stragglers: Today is the last day of the special prices for the GUADEC Hotels. It'll probably cost more after today.
I'm in the Hansa hotel. The youth hostel is much cheaper but I'm a light sleeper and even more grumpy when tired. I'll arrive in Stuttgart early on Saturday morning, for the GNOME Foundation board meeting, and stay around on Wednesday for the Advisory Board meeting.
Yes, until I can get my Palm Zire 31 working with Fedora Core 3, my blog is my calendar.
The GUADEC registration page is now online, finally. We're lucky that Fernando San Martin Woerner quickly put together a plan B at the last moment. Yes, we only have PayPal. Yes, you should help to create a better permanent system for next year.
This is a good time to remind you that donations help developers who otherwise could not go to GUADEC (and the U.S. summits). I always feel guilty that I don't find time to hack much on the GNOME desktop itself, so I've just donated 200 Dollars to help people who do. I suggest you do the same – it's a good deal.
As Glom gradually becomes usable, gaining most of the features that most people need from it, I'm thinking about how I'll promote it to regular users. It would be nice if some creative type created a logo/icon for it, maybe vaguely expressing its functionality.
Yes, I'm open to a name change too.
For GUADEC in Stuttgart, We have a chance of some cheap, but maybe not so warm/comfortable, dormitory accommodation at the Feuerbach “Camp Stuttgart”. Please sign up quickly on the Wiki GUADEC accommodation page if you are interested, because we have left it late to reserve beds there.