GObject Introspection hackfest in Berlin

A quick (and late!) recollection of what happened in Berlin during the GObject Introspection hackfest:

• Red Hat's John (J5) Palmieri worked on new releases of PyGObject and on the documentation generators.
• Prezi's Laszlo Pandy worked mainly in resurrecting Zach Goldberg's DocBook generator, merging it into master and adding important stuff to it such as description parsing and class hierarchy rendering.
• Red Hat's Colin Walters reviewed code, gave input on people's direction and answered thousands of questions.
• Syllogist's Shaun McCance added features to Mallard to match gtk-doc and worked on the DocBook and mallard generators.
• Volunteer Torsten Schönfeld worked on improvements in gobject-introspection that are needed by his Perl bindings but that will benefit other bindings as well.
• Canonical's Martin Pitt worked on server-side GDBus support in PyGObject and some improvements trickled to gobject-introspection.
• Igalia's Guillaume Emont worked on adding default values to typelibs, #558620.
• Codethink's Richard Dale worked on GObject-Consume, making it much easier to consume GObject-based APIs from Qt.
• KDE volunteer Arno Rehn worked along with Richard on GObject-Consume.
• Volunteer Johan Dahlin, as one of the maintainers, also supported all others, added missing information to the .gir files and hacked on the DocBook generator.
• OLPC's Simon Schampijer worked on porting Sugar to use introspection instead of the static bindings.
• Volunteer Pavel Holejsovsky couldn't be with us in Berlin but hacked along in #introspection adding stuff to gobject-introspection that his advanced Lua bindings were already needing.
• Collabora's Tomeu Vizoso worked on the documentation generators and on the train back home rebased them to use Mako templates.

Nemein's Piotr Pokora and Nokia's Ivan Frade couldn't join us at the end because of unexpected obligations but we look forward to their contributions in the future.

Travel and lodging has been sponsored by the GNOME Foundation:

Openismus hosted us at their office when the Summit was over:

Nemein invited us to a delicious fondue dinner:

And Collabora treated us to tasty Ethiopian food and flooded us in beer afterwards:

Big thanks to those companies that sent their hackers, to the volunteers that devoted their time and talent, and to the sponsors for their support.

To close, I think this was a hackfest filled with fun and that we made good progress on the stated goals, most importantly having expanded the set of people that hack on gobject-introspection.

There were constant signs of appreciation towards Berlin, its food, beer, people and bike infrastructure. Looking forward for the next one!

Clutter WebKit port at the Desktop Summit

Collabora is sponsoring work on the Clutter port for WebKit and we are going to take the chance to discuss this with the Clutter community during the Desktop Summit in Berlin this month.

Add a comment if you are interested and if there's enough people we'll register for a BoF.

See you in Berlin!

PyGObject BoF at the Desktop Summmit 2011

A BoF has just been proposed for the Desktop Summit in Berlin in August, this is the description:

We'll get together to port applications from PyGtk+ to Gtk+ 3 (using GObject introspection). Seasoned developers of PyGObject will meet applications developers and will help each other port applications and improve PyGObject itself.

The session is still just a proposal and we'll only know if it has been accepted in a few days, but if you will be at the Summit and this session interests you, please feel free to add yourself to the list of prospective participants.

See you in Berlin!

Time to port your Python application to GObject introspection?

From time to time I realize that not all maintainers of GNOME applications written in Python have been following what has been happening upstream during the GNOME 3 development cycle.

Some of the noise we have been making about introspection and hackfests may have reached them, but for someone who has only time to review patches and make releases, this new stuff may have seemed as of secondary relevance.

For those that are asking themselves whether they should invest time now into moving away from PyGtk and the other static bindings, I would summarize the decision as to whether you want your application to run on Gtk+ 3 (and other recent APIs in GNOME 3) or not.

Besides that, there are other advantages such as reduced memory usage, fast startup and being able to use libraries that have no static bindings.

About distribution, most major distros have already packaged the whole of GNOME 3 and the rest will follow in the following months. As a rule of thumb, if you can develop for GNOME 3 in C in a particular distro version, you have already all you need to port your app to introspection.

As always, I want to remember that PyGObject (and gobject-introspection for that matter) has no dedicated developers. If it's progressing forward is because some application authors decided to jump and lend a hand, so if you are producing code that uses GNOME and Python, please consider dedicating some time to file bugs, write test cases and maybe writing a patch yourself.

Session on GObject Introspection at the Ubuntu App Developer Week

The talk will be oriented to developers that use or want to use GNOME technologies and still haven't fully grasped how GObject Introspection is changing the game. It won't contain any distro specificities, so join without fear even if you don't use Ubuntu, if it's of your interest.

It should be of special interest to those willing to contribute to GNOME Shell or that plan to attend Martin Pitt's talk about life after PyGTK this Tuesday at 16 UTC.

You can find instructions about how to join in the link below, plus other interesting talks:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek

See you later today at 17 UTC.

GNOME 3 at Prague

Tomorrow we'll hold a GNOME 3 Launch Party here in Prague and between interesting and even controversial talks, I will be talking a bit about the changes in the development story that happened during GNOME 3.

http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/LaunchParty/Czech

See you there!

GObject-Introspection hackfest

Following the success of the two last PyGObject hackfests, the idea of having one focused on GObject-introspection has been floating for a while.

After enough people agreed it could be a good idea, I have created a page in the wiki to start filling in the details. We should have a good provisional list of goals and participants before we get to things such as the place and date, which will be better decided once we have the participant list.

http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/Introspection2011

So if you are planning to do some work on GObject-introspection that would benefit from happening in the hackfest, please add it to the goals list in the wiki.

If you won't be able to work on it yourself but you think something should really happen in the near future, please add it to the comments in this blog post.

I know we can count on consultancies such as my employer Collabora to sponsor the hackfest, but I would like to encourage downstreams to send their hackers and show they care, are able and deserve more good will.