A while ago I coded a small patch which I submitted to the Banshee music player project. It has a plugin which supports sharing of your music library via the DAAP protocol, but it was only sharing individual tracks and not playlists which made browsing a large collection a little tedious. So I cooked up a little code to solve the problem and attached it to a new bug in Banshee’s bug tracker.
I was happy to find my patch was accepted and was eventually released in version 0.13. I’m even happier to find that with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 7.10 my patch has found it’s way downstream to my favourite distro too.
It’s interesting to chart the progress of an open-source contribution: I submitted my patch upstream (i.e. directly to the Banshee) on 13th Feb 2007, it made it into a stable release six months later on the 5th August 2007, and now in October it’s beginning to make it downstream into the distributions. In total around eight months have passed. At first this appears to be a long time but it’s better new features don’t float downstream too quickly so they have more time to mature.
I’ve just read over the Gnome 2.20 Release Notes and I must say I’m looking forward to using it in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). There are quite a few small improvements that I’ve been waiting for. For instance:
- Finally the Evolution mail client has an icon for the Gnome Panel’s Notification Area, I hope it supports minimizing of Evolution too (without leaving behind the task bar button).
- Evolution now has a built-in backup utility to help export and move settings to another machine.
- The properties dialog for a mounted disk now shows a disk-usage pie chart - very useful.
- One neat feature is that if you lock your screen and go away someone can leave you a message to read once you return (no more sticky post-its stuck to your screen).
- Automatic unlocking of the Gnome Keyring (Password Manager) when you login or unlock your screen.
However, the thing I am most happy to see is the new Gnome Library documentation site. This is a very polished site collecting together Gnome related tutorials, manuals, and API references. I think this is a great step forward for the Gnome project; I have felt in the past the resources were not as well presented or well maintained as they could be, particularly developer docs on subjects such as Gtk and Glib.
