News

Well, today we released EWL 0.5.3, as its been 13 months since the last release.  According to my best estimates, 53241 lines of code were changed, and that isn’t including the massive formatting change that dj2 committed.  In addition, there were 85 bugs fixed.  Here is the release announcement:

I'm pleased to announce the release of EWL version 0.5.3. This release
has some extensive changes, including the following highlights:
       * Version 0.5.3:
         - Fixed compile warnings on 64-bit systems
         - Improved entry selection and cursor handling
         - A variety of bug fixes and type corrections
         - Formatting improvements
         - Normalized widget realize/unrealize and show/hide
         - Cleaned out private headers to reduce build times
         - Rewrite of paned widget
         - Addition of constructor unit tests
         - 'Create Directory' button added to filepicker
         - Kinetic scrolling added to the scrollpane
         - Stop building unneeded static libraries to reduce build time
         - The ewl_password widget is now part of ewl_entry to reduce code duplication
         - Various feature additions to the filepicker family of widgets
         - Better robustness of ewl_progressbar widget
         - Split flags into attributes of the ewl_object and ewl_widget objects
         - Internal XDND support
         - Improved MVC selection handling
         - Addition of a SHRINKABLE fill policy
         - Improved container behaviour
         - Keybinding support for the ewl_text widget
         - Addition of an ewl_icondialog widget
         - Improvement of model terminology
         - Add an UNMANAGED flag to improve container behaviour
         - EWL is now Evilized!
         - Addition of a alpha channel slider to the ewl_colorpicker widget
         - Autofoo improvements
         - Expanded support for config key removal
         - General window management hint improvements
         - Improved robustness of the ewl_grid widget
         - Improved widget signal handling
         - Use merged software X11 engine
         - Various code cleanups thanks to LLVM static analysis
         - Removal of original ewl_tree, rename ewl_tree2 to ewl_tree
         - Moved tutorials from the test files to seperate directory
         - Creation of coverage report with gcov and lcov is now supported
         - Addition of ewl_freebox_mvc widget
         - ewl_embed now inherits from ewl_cell instead of ewl_overlay
         - Expanding of the ewl_tree widget API
         - Various fixes and feature additions for the ewl_text widget
         - Allow the ewl_label widget to be trunctated with '...'
         - Improved the cosmetics of the debugging macros
         - Revamped ewl_combo MVC API and implementation
         - Split widget tests into GUI and unit test cases
         - Fixed widget reparenting

Thank you to the following contributors for making this release possible:

        Peter Wehrfritz
        Jaime Thomas
        Teodor Petrov
        Dan Sinclair
        Vincent Torri
        Stephen Houston

This release can be checked out from:
        http://svn.enlightenment.org/svn/e/tags/ewl/ewl-0.5.3/

Of course, Nathan Ingersoll should also get some credit for this release, seeing as he is the main author and did the actual releasing.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve just finished moving into my house in Kanata.  I’ll be starting work tomorrow, but getting to work is a bit of a pain with the transit strike.  I’ll take a cab tomorrow morning, and hope that someone there is nice enough to offer me a ride home.  I guess I’ll see how that goes.

Update

Its been a while, since I’ve written on here, so I guess its time for an update.  First off, I finally got a co-op job for this winter, at COM DEV International as a software developer.  I’ll be working on control systems for some parts of the James Webb Space Telescope (replacement for the Hubble Telescope), which is the best job I could hope for (although the ones for Xandros looked pretty cool as well).  I even need security clearance for it!  Anyways, I’ll be moving to Ottawa in a while for the co-op, and although its not Europe its still somewhere more interesting than here.

On an unrelated note, I’ve very slowly been working on ECDB.  I think that I have the erasing part working the way I’m happy with, although I haven’t tested it yet (don’t have an eraseable disc).  I need to ask pygi about how to simulate this.  Anyways, heres a screenshot (there is actually no EWL being used in this picture – all edje and embryo):

ECDB Update

I had some requests on IRC for a recent screenshot of ECDB, so here’s a screencast instead:

More ECDB work

So I’ve been doing some more work on ECDB.  It is now pretty much at the same point that it was before when I was using entirely EWL widgets.  At the moment, only the filelist widget is from EWL, all the rest is Edje.  An added bonus of using mostly edje are cool things like a typebuf for the filelist.  At the moment it now allows for changing directories and setting the filelist filters, and it’ll get more commands as I feel the need.

code_swarm

Noticed this a couple days ago, decided to give it a try.  It results in a pretty neat video, and shows how many people really have commited to EWL.  Music from here, and you can find more about code_swarm here.

Update: Switched video to Vimeo, as it is better quality.  Full-sized video.

ECDB Fun

So I’ve got back to working on ECDB a bit again, and I’ve scrapped my previous EWL-only interface for a nice as-much-edje-as-possible interface.  At the moment I’m thinking that all of the filelist and tree-related widgets will be EWL, and the rest edje.  As a comparison between old (unfinished) and new (even more unfinished), here you go:

EWL Only:

Old interface

New, with edje:

(link)

Anyways, I like the look of the new version better.  Now just to find that odd EWL infinite loop.

Tiring

I figured that now would be a good time to talk about what I’ve seen going on in the Enlightenment project.  I haven’t been around the project for that long (< 1 year), so maybe some of my views are naive, but I’ve found a lot of the stuff pretty frusterating.

First:  The license discussions.  The whole thing is frusterating, and the from what I can tell, there are only a couple people who feel strongly positive.  We first have a guy who in my entire time with the project has only written massive novels to the mailing and never actually contributed code, and then a guy who is speaking from the viewpoint of company.  From the viewpoint of a company, I would have thought that BSD would be more free and preferable to the LGPL.  And, while its nice that you are giving back, what other companies are doing doesn’t affect you in the slightest.  The solution to this has been proposed several times by the cooler heads, and that is just to drop it.  All projects under the Enlightenment umbrella should be under the same license, and as we’ve seen, relicensing is impossible.  So too bad, you missed your chance, wait until we do another E17ish complete rewrite.  Until then, you are wasting time.

Second: Lack of new developers.  As one of the only (I think) new developers that have joined the project as a hobby, I believe that this gives me a somewhat different perspective than others around.  The first main problem is the oft-mentioned code duplication.  The easiest examples are the 3 different widget libraries around (EWL, ETK, e_widgets), and maybe a new 4th coming in with the GSOC projects.  Another problem that I feel is the confusion over where we are heading next.  Whenever I start to look into improving or hacking libraries other than EWL, there is soon another discussion on the mailing list about a completely new idea/way of doing things.  I realize that this sort of development is necessary, but it is fucking intimidating to jump in totally fresh and contribute.  It never seems to settle down enough to do some small changes/fixes/whatever without all of your work being planned to be rewritten/removed.  I don’t even have an idea how to improve this, as talking about it/better community interaction seem to have failed up to this point.  Maybe we just need an impartial moderator/dictator to keep things slightly saner.

Third: People.  I’ve never really been a people person, or that actively involved with the community, which is good and bad.  Its good because I think I’ve managed to stay fairly impartial, but its bad because I don’t know any of the participants as well as I should.  Lately we seem to have become way to entrenched in our views, and it is showing.  From my point of view, the entire project is done FOR FUN.  People like Toma, who come in and stay positive and try new things are the ones we need to keep in mind when dealing with each other.  In not just my opinion, this project has become too focused on politics and other crap that draws us away from the real point of the project: to have fun making cool stuff. Thats the beauty of open source and coding, not worrying about our code getting stolen or trying to outshine everyone else with your own separate implementation of the same thing.

Anyways, there’s my view on the past little bits events.  I guess I’ll just ride this out, and see what things look like after the changes go down.  Also, I’d like to say a sorry goodbye to Dan Sinclair (dj2), who has done some good work for the project.

On a slightly more positive note, its nice to see more Enlightenment-specific stuff on Planet E thanks Luchezar Petkov (Manowarrior), Terrance Hutchinson, and Tom Haste.