Now, could someone please make Livejournal stop leaking posts you can't read? There is a German proverb "Was ich nicht wei , macht mich nicht hei ." (roughly translated to "what I don't know doesn't make me curious"). kthxbye

Now, could someone please make Livejournal stop leaking posts you can't read? There is a German proverb "Was ich nicht wei , macht mich nicht hei ." (roughly translated to "what I don't know doesn't make me curious"). kthxbye

<eddyp> anyone knows of a quick way to reformat a text to a certain with in vim?
<eddyp> width, even
<liw> !fmt -w 42
<pkern> Something along the lines of gq I think.
<pkern> Visual gq says :help gq
<eddyp> liw: ":%!fmt -w 42" should be correct
<eddyp> thanks
* eddyp notes the fmt command for future reference
<liw> fmt is a pretty handy command at times
<ricky> Wow, that is handy.
* seanius is a fan of the J and fmt combo
<pkern> (gq has the advantage that textwidth is obeyed. And fmt could be specified with formatprg.)
<eddyp> pkern: that gq is handy, too
<eddyp> "gggqG" and bam, everything is refromatted
<eddyp> does anyone mind if I post this on my blog?
<eddyp> pkern, liw, seanius, ricky ?
<liw> eddyp, nah
<pkern> eddyp: Please enlighten me why you could possibly need our approval (apart from copying the log verbatim perhaps).
<eddyp> pkern: exactly :-)
<eddyp> verbatim copy; irc is the best source of documentation :-)
<ricky> eddyp: Go ahead :)
<pkern> eddyp: Then please correct the obvious mistake of mine: ":help gq says Visual gq", hah. And I disagree on the usefulness of IRC logs as documentation. :-P
<ricky> As a side note, the -u option seems cut words at spaces properly, which I'd been looking for :)
<seanius> eddyp: if you find my armchair opinions valuable for some reason, then by all means :)

Uh, yeah. So I "lost" a whole day due to two "signals" missing in the ruby-gtk2 wrapper. Both GtkTreeDragSource's "row-draggable" and GtkTreeDragDest's "row-drop-possible" are implemented as virtual functions, instead of plain signals. This means that a new gobject class needs to be created to properly use those callbacks. Well, Armin Burgmeier and I had a nice long Gobby session (completely over IPv6 by the way, welcome to the bleeding-edge of technology, where no port forwards are required) about this problem. Him being the main developer of Gobby, he knows much about Gtk, so finally we came up with this patch, which adds both functions as signals to the Ruby-Gtk API. It's sad that my program will require a patch to the GUI wrappers in order to run correctly, but this is, as far as I see, the only way to get proper drag'n'drop in Ruby.

I was quiet about it for a long time, but here it is: my first Summer of Code status report. For a bigger picture: I am working on a graphical front-end to the bug tracking system Debian uses. Well, at least I am supposed to work on it. First on my list was something else: a Gtk2 graphical front-end for the well-known bug reporting tool "reportbug", which might later be integrated somehow into Debian's Gnome environment. According to the list of milestones I created when I drafted the application in less than an hour (due to the deadline approaching) I need to release a first prototype of such a GUI today. It took more time than expected to work on it, so I have not yet started any work on the main graphical front-end. I started a few days later than expected, due to some delay until the approved applications were published and I also had to learn Python from scratch. This task was not too hard, but I am still often confused by the lack of consistency throughout the language. Compared to Ruby, a language I know reasonably well and in which I already coded much, Python has much more syntactic constructs for primitives and in my opinion this leads to a lack of consistency. But well, one gets used to it... There was once a "original" Gnome front-end, but it is discontinued since some years already. I did not look much at it, neither at the patch in the BTS which should basically bring it to the current Gnome2 libraries. To properly understand the hooks I need to provide for an interface plugin I started from scratch, only reusing the core idea of the old front-end: the use of the GnomeUI Druid. The new GtkAssistant is not yet ready to be deployed, being introduced with the upcoming Gtk 2.10 release. Still I have a weird feeling about the Gnome Druid, because I abuse it just to provide a consistent look. reportbug does not support backing up to a previous question, so the Back button is generally deactivated. I tried to modify core code as few as possible, as I have not yet talked with the reportbug maintainer Chris Lawrence. I will do so in due course. However after the old GUI front-end code was basically discarded (its usage is discouraged with a prominent notice), many changes to the core code did only take the text interface into account. (Well, I just suppose this, I did not do much research into reportbug's past.) So some tiny changes were needed to provide a few more hooks. There are, however, more to come, especially in connection with one input type (select_options, which could often be implemented as presenting a simple yes/no dialogue). The configuration basically works already, as seen below. What does not work are spawing the right editor and getting a filename from the user interface. But those are minor quirks and not too hard to fix. I need to develop in the open, as specified by the Summer of Code ruleset, and now I could do so, after about four rewrites of the GUI code. The main GUI loop is now in a thread, receiving commands from the main thread running the logic and sending the input back through a queue. (I used a pipe-based approach first, using an IO selector provided by glib, but it did not work well enough and this approach is far simpler.) So the current version is not vapourware, but there is still some more work to do to get it really usable. I will put my work into the Summer of Code Subversion repository as soon as the necessary access privileges are synced onto costa, an Alioth machine. Hopefully it will be merged into reportbug when I completely finished off this project.