So, we are still mostly able to keep our release each two weeks promise. For this release we have two big additions to the support side of the project: translations support, and gtk-doc support. The former is made of the usual makefile rules used by gettext-enabled projects with a rework to fit in the non-recursive build process of WebKitGTK+. The later is not as well integrated yet, so you have to go manually to WebKit/gtk/docs and type make, but not before editing WebKit/gtk/webkit/webkitprivate.cpp and adding a call to g_thread_init(NULL); to webkit_init(). You get the idea, we need help in polishing this one. As for code, Xan Lopez has been doing some serious work on accessibility support, using ATK. After the a11y hackfest he landed a number of patches moving forward in this direction. It looks like we will be able to meet the requirements for becoming blessed for use by GNOME. We also got a nice printing API, that allows applications to stop using the nasty hack that would send a print() call through javascript. They are also able to control/monitor the print process, or automate it, so that no print dialog is shown, if they wish. That s it, come join the party =D. Now, for 1.1.6, I m hoping Diego finishes the spelling check patch, and it would be awesome to have Jan s proper error reporting!

Or WebKitGTK+ gains localization support ! Continuing our quest to finish off old bugs, and plug the bigger and more visible missing holes in functionality, a lot of work went into making WebKitGTK+ l10n-capable. This work has been committed today. This means we will now be able to translate things like dialogs, context menus, form elements, and any other string that makes sense to translate and is generated by WebKitGTK+.

Don t be fooled by the fact that the context menu is talking about spell checking, by the way. This is still something we do not support, and is only there because Epiphany doesn t override WebKitGTK+ s default context menus. I know that diegoe is working on it, though.

In other news, I am now working for Collabora! It is a great opportunity for me, and I will do my best to be on par with the great people that are now my colleagues. I have had the pleasure of working with Marco Barisione, and Pierre-Luc on WebKitGTK+, for some time, and some (most? =)) of them are also fellow Debian and GNOME developers, so I feel at home. Contributing to WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany is something I do as part of my job too, now, and I m not planning on dropping my volunteer contributions =). I have actually landed some patches, and worked on the 1.1.4 release with my @collabora.co.uk address already, and I hope the future holds more opportunity for such contributions!

So, we have been able to keep up with releasing every two weeks. I can t say I emptied my wishlist for this release, but we did get a good load of good new features, and bug fixes. Go get it, and come back to read about what s new. Those of you who hate when you middle-click a link and it opens in another window will be glad to know that this version clears the only lasting missing piece of API required to allowing the browser to concede your wish. If you get irritated with weird scrolling behavior when using the keyboard, this release also fixes most of the remaining pet peeves, with a proper GtkBinding implementation for our WebView, done by Xan. Font rendering has also received some much needed love, and we have chased and killed most of the problems with WebKitGTK+ wanting to download stuff instead of displaying them because of bad headers provided by the server. There is still work to be done in this area, but most of it will probably go into libsoup, instead. You may have heard about HTML5 media tags support. Well, we have sharpened some of the rough edges of the code that already existed, making it able to play some basic ogg examples, such as the ones used by the Mozilla guys for testing. Now on to make 1.1.5 rock even more!

No, you re not reading it wrong but what about 1.1.2? , you ask. Well, we made a small mistake with the soversion there (if mistakes regarding soversion are ever small, that is =/), so we had to quickly release a fixed up version before packages start showing up for distributions with an incorrect library soname. Apologies. With this release we have a shiny new website at http://webkitgtk.org/, hosted by Igalia and designed by Christian Dywan, who s one of the contributors to WebKitGTK+ s code. This new release sports many interesting features and fixes. You may remember me talking about the download support initially contributed by Collabora, which I was fixing up and pushing for inclusion. Well, it is now available, and already implemented in Epiphany 2.27.0. Christian Dywan tells me he won t let Midori stay behind Epiphany on this one, so expect support for downloading correctly integrated in Midori as well. Some more pet peeves got fixed with this release, such as scrolling with keys such as space bar, home, end, not behaving the way people expect. We also found more improvements which are in order for libsoup, and we ll be pushing them, even though we have added small workarounds to WebKitGTK+ itself for the time being. We have added proper logging support for our port, providing a WEBKIT_BUILD environment variable. Documentation on how to use this will follow soonish, but for now you can look at the LoggingGTK.cpp file to know what values you can add to that variable. Also notice that only debug builds use logging to its full extent! WebKitGTK+ 1.1.1 has now hit Debian experimental, by the way, and I plan to have 1.1.3 uploaded early this week. An epiphany-webkit package based on 2.27 is in the works, and should be in soon, too. There seems to be lots of interest in having a PPA for Ubuntu, as well, so we may see that happening soonish. We plan to get more testing this way, and be able to uncover and fix more bugs, so that we can get a rock solid release ready in time for GNOME 2.28.

So, I just checked in for attending Bossa Conference. If you want to talk about Debian, WebKit, WebKitGTK+, Gksu-PolicyKit, I ll be quite interested =).

A new version of WebKit s GTK+ port is here, as also announced by Xan! Before I start listing the new features and fixes, let me give you a download link =). For this version we have changed the binary interface slightly, which requires a soversion bump, so rebuilding applications is in order. The API is still stable, though. Another major change worthy of note is that we have made libsoup the only HTTP backend available for WebKitGTK+, removing the CURL related code from our port (the CURL backend remains in the tree, though, as it is used by other ports). This should simplify implementation and allows us to expose Soup objects in the API, reducing the amount of wrapping code that is necessary. We are already exposing the SoupSession we use internally, providing yet more power and flexibility to applications using our API. In this release we finally get to see the official debut of the Web Inspector in the GTK+ port. Can t wait to see releases of our dear browsers featuring the inspector =). Numerous improvements to hading policy decisions regarding navigations and window creation requests to the application have also come with this release. We worked hard on finding and fixing crashes for this release, but also numerous fixes for those pet peeves that bother us just a bit, but enough to add up got landed. There are more of those to kill, but things look promising. We are hoping to release again in two weeks, so expect more fixes soon. So, that s it. Grab the new version, test it, report bugs, and enjoy!

So, after some time contributing to WebKit/GTK+ I got invited to be an official committer, and today (yesterday, technically) my account was setup. I have thus been able to commit one of my patches which were already reviewed myself. It is indeed pretty simple. I didn t want to fuck up big if I did, you know =). At least it is much more meaningful than my first patch that got committed. Being a committer means I can help speed things up a little by freeing reviewers from the work involved in commiting some of the patches, giving them more time to review new patches instead, so I am very excited about this.

Since late 2008 WebKit/GTK+ has been advancing in a better pace than earlier that year. Patches are being reviewed and committed actively, mostly by Holger Freyther (zecke). This last month, among other goodies such as better keyword searching for the WooHoo bar in Epiphany and enabling WebKit s Soup backend to upload files, I have been working on getting download support into WebKit/GTK+ so that we can use that API in Epiphany. Most of the heavy work was done by Marco Barisione and Pierre-Luc Beaudoin early last year. I brought the patch up-to-date and modified it with input from various people into something simpler and handling some more use cases. Tonight I finally reached a milestone, being able to download a Debian ISO with Epiphany/WebKit:

This is work in progress. There are many rough edges to sharpen, still, but this work should be ready for merging very soon. If you want to help take a look at the WebKit bug report we are using to track this work, and the corresponding Epiphany bug report. Anyway, I ve been using both Epiphany and WebKit/GTK+ from trunk for about a month now, and the number of things I am missing is going down quickly. Come help us test and get a regressionless Epiphany with WebKit/GTK+ for GNOME 2.28!

I’m looking for people who are interested in testing the first release of gksu-polkit. I uploaded the first tarball to http://people.debian.org/~kov/gksu/gksu-polkit-0.0.1.tar.gz. There are also x86 packages available (built on a sid with a lot of experimental stuff, so if you have trouble installing please email me and I’ll have that fixed =P). For some history and discussion on the whys and hows do take a look at the README which exists inside the tarball (or git repo), and on the small page I wrote about it. For those who want to fiddle with the code, and perhaps help me finding bugs and fixing them, here’s my public git tree: git://git.debian.org/~kov/gksu-polkit.git

So, we’ve been strugling in the WebKit/GTK+ project to get things moving a bit quicker in the API front. This is much needed if we want to see applications really migrating to a WebKit-based implementation, specially for us to have an Epiphany/WebKit release. It seems like Holger Freyther has returned full-throttle into patch reviewing and commiting, and has already committed my patch to add WebInspector support, and the one to allow applications to handle requests of new windows, which had been reviewed in a meeting with many developers weeks ago. We should probably focus on reviewing and applying the web policy delegates one? Also, Holger has done a tremendously awesome work on getting the documentation that is already written available (and improved!), take a look!

From blizzard’s blog 1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don t change your clothes, don t fix your hair just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

gksu-polkit gets pipe support One of the features I really wanted to get into gksu-policykit early was working correctly with pipes. With the current gksu you cannot do something such as echo blah gksu tr a-z A-Z. It is actually very hard to work correctly with input/output with su and sudo bellow. I do think it also has something to do with me not being too clever in UNIX file descriptors at the time I originally planned how gksu works. I did get an email from someone at Sun offering to write support for that who never mailed me again, but anyway… gksu-policykit is currently able to get all the input and output forwarded to/from the process by using an interface similar to glib’s g_spawn_async_with_pipes. Here’s what we are able to do already:

$ echo test string   ./gksu/gksu-polkit /usr/bin/tr a-z A-Z
TEST STRING
$

It’s impressive to me that all the input and output goes over DBus quite nicely.

So it is currently possible to use simple library calls in glib-based code to run something as root, by taking advantage of the gksu policykit mechanism: GksuProcess* gksu_process_new(const gchar *working_directory, const gchar **arguments);
gboolean gksu_process_spawn_async(GksuProcess *process, GError **error); The DBus service already works; it is able to setup the environment and X authorization correctly. There is still lots to do; startup notification is still not handled, and dealing with the application’s stdandard output and error messages, as well as providing a way for the caller to send stuff into the processe’s standard input. It is already possible to start an application and know that it has been finished, though. As for the code: $ git clone git://kov.eti.br/srv/git/gksu-polkit.git/ Criticism is welcome! In other news… I’d like to ask our dear lazy web if anyone is using some nice way of providing only posts tagged in specific categories in a feed in wordpress. I’d like to use that to provide my posts to planet debian from my wordpress install.

As far as debcamp work plans go, my own has been making me quite happy. I started the week trying to start implementing gksu policykit mostly in vala, and failing miserably. Vala isn't ready to help me do some of the more weird things I had in mind. The good news is falling back to C worked pretty smoothly, and I have the basic foundation working. There is plenty to be implemented still, but moving forward always feels good. If anyone is interested in discussing the gksu replacement that is being built on top of the PolicyKit framework come talk to me in the hack lab =D. Take a look at this gratuitous screenshot.

First day at debconf8's debcamp! I have published an ical file with the stuff I plan to attend, if anyone is interested: http://people.debian.org/~kov/kov_debconf8.ical. Btw, dear lazy web, the official ical file is using ART as TZID, and that seems to make Evolution go nuts on the timing of the talks. Anyone has got a clue on what my be happening? I downloaded the file and changed it to use America/Sao_Paulo as TZID and now Evo acts correctly.

So, some interesting things happened since I last reported. TurboGears finally entered experimental, and has received a bit of good feedback from some users; I became sqlobject co-maintainer, and packaged a svn snapshot to experimental to make that happen, too. TG 0.9a8 has just been uploaded, btw. Feedback would be great! I would welcome people willing to help on deciding the best way and doing packaging of TG add-on widgets. In other news, I've been doing some last feature aditions to libgksu and gksu. The former now ships a gksu-properties capplet that allows users to set up some of the behavior. The gconf options and this capplet surely need some love, but they'll get it in the future. After the "redesign" libgksu now holds almost all the code that does the gksu magic, and should be more secure in some ways. The application, gksu, ships a nautilus extension, which adds a 'open as administrator' item in the context menu for files and directories in Nautilus. I'd love to receive feedback and buf reports on this new feature. Right now the nautilus extension uses the gksu application, instead of the library, since there seems to be problems with doing async calls of libgksu inside of another main loop, or something, and I could not get it to work. The gksuexec application, which provided the 'Run as another user' menu item has been removed in these last versions. Will anyone miss it? I'm willing to have this functionality implemented in gksu itself, if needed, but I'm not sure it's that useful.

So, I just finished the first "working draft" of the TurboGears 0.9 packaging. I've uploaded a tarball with all the source and binary packages involved. They should work on unstable; please send comments and error reports to my email (look at the maintainer of the turbogears package). The packaging for TurboGears 0.8.9 is also available, and in need of comments and testing. I'm hoping to be able to upload turbogears 0.8.9 and the modules I packaged to unstable this week, and TG 0.9 to experimental. You can see many of the packages are already available in the python-modules team subversion repository.

So, long time no blog entry. Work has been sucking my blood these days, but I managed to do some stuff recently that I feel like sharing. First of all, I've been enjoying TurboGears a bunch. Unfortunately I didn't get around to playing with it as much as I would have liked. Some time ago I became the maintainer of cherrypy, and that became an important piece of TG some time later. Now TG has been using something called Python eggs, and its versioning and dependency information. We fought a bunch on the debian-python mailing list trying to figure out how to handle that stuff in Debian packages and it seems like the best solution is the one which ended up on the new python-cherrypy package, which packaged CherryPy 2.1, and right now contains CherryPy 2.2. Most of the efforts of the Debian Python people has been documented on the Debian Python FAQ. Also, let me say that python-support is really cool; Thanks Joss! Also, I'm now a member of the Debian Python Modules maintainers team! Team maintainership is a really good idea, and I'm happy that it is becoming more and more the rule, not the exception; and I am very happy to be part of many very good teams. In other news, I've been working on the new version of libgksu/gksu. The API for libgksu has been greatly improved and simplified. The new design also allowed me to handle some situations in a much saner way; some things that bothered me for a long time are now gone. Packages are on their way to experimental, but if you want to take a look at what is happening, and comment on the new API (please, do!), you can look here: http://people.debian.org/~kov/gksu/libgksu2/ I'll upload some packages to http://people.debian.org/~kov/gksu/debian/ while the packages which are on NEW are not processed.