Re: ANN: GWorkspace 1.0

[Riccardo Canalicchio]

thanks for the work on GWorkspace and congratulations on the release!!

merry xmas and happy new year,
Riccardo

On Sat 25. Dec 2021 at 02:34, Riccardo Mottola via Info-gnustep <
info-gnus...@gnu.org> wrote:

> GWORKSPACE 1.0
> --
>
> Christmas, in Anno Domini 2021.
>
> This is a different announcemement than usual, since it is a special
> release: it is tagged 1.0 after many years of work. It is different,
> because it is a personal writing. The last release has been long ago,
> but many refinements and improvements came in; there has been a person
> who spurred me improving and working on GWorkspace: Bertrand
> Dekoninck.
>
> Hard times were the past two years and they have not been easy and the
> pandemic is not yet over, so in the Christmas Eve, a new release of
> GWorkspace has been done and it is dedicated to Bertrand: so shall he
> be remembered from us GNUsteppers, he, who had not the privilege to
> live till Christmas with his family.
>
> A reserved user who really gave the sensation to be interested in
> GNUstep and its applications, thus, especially GWorkspace.
> Continuously he proposed contributions, tested, always gentle,
> collaborative: a friend. I will miss him, we will miss him.
> Betrand, as me, worked also on PowerPC - so it was inspiring to know
> that supporting that Big Endian platform was useful! After the
> pandemic, I wanted to meet hi8mfor a hacking session, but it will no
> longer happen on earth.
>
> Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
>
>
> Riccardo
>
>
> What is new?
>
> * "Modern mode" enables now clearer icon lables on the desktop
> * Single click launch is now an option and affects the Dock and the
> Tabbed shelf
> * cleaned up code in Shelf and Dock Icons
> * Fixed display of available tools for documents in the inspector
> * Improved display of handled extensions for an applications
> * Improve image scaling for image content inspector and image
> thumbnailer
> * Better handling of removable volumes
> * Improved French, Italian and Spanish localizations, as well as new
> Japanese and Polish ones
> * The build system was improved and cleaned up, allowing easier
> packaging and building on different platforms
> * Fix crash in Metadata extractor
> * Fix build failure on GNU/HURD
>
> Links for info and downloads:
>
> http://www.gnustep.org/experience/GWorkspace.html
> http://www.gnustep.org/resources/downloads.php
> https://github.com/gnustep/apps-gworkspace
>
> --
> Sent with GNUMail on GNUstep on Gentoo running on a ThinkPad T510i-i5.
>
>
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>

The State of Debian Packaging

[Steven R. Baker]

Heya folks,

I've been following the other threads, but haven't been computering as actively 
over the holidays, so I wanted to give an overview and "source of truth" on the 
Debian packages of GNUstep.

Sorry for the long one, but I'm aiming to give a background on the "how and 
why" of Debian packaging; the current state of things; how to get newer version 
of things; and how to help.

I intend to make a README for GNUstep in Debian and publish it, and a lot of 
what is here will go there.  But for now, you'll have to wade through this 
email.

Background: Debian packages are often considered "wildly out of date," and this 
is only true because of the way the Debian release process works.

Debian has three "current" distributions.  "stable", which is the current 
released version.  "unstable" (called sid, which is a backronym now meaning 
Still In Development) is where new package versions are uploaded.  Many 
daily-drivers of Debian use "testing", which is unstable packages delayed by a 
period of time (two weeks from memory) and only "promoted" to testing when 
there aren't any release critical (RC) bugs reported against them.

The Debian packages are maintained by the Debian GNUstep packaging team, which 
is sorely understaffed.

You can find the repos for the packaging efforts on Debian Salsa, which is 
Debian's GitLab instance: https://salsa.debian.org/gnustep-team 
  Every GNUstep related package that is 
in Debian (or will be RSN) is included there.

Let's use an example to demonstrate the current state of things, gnustep-base 
which can be found here: https://salsa.debian.org/gnustep-team/gnustep-base 


The `master` branch contains the release that is currently in sid.  In the case 
of gnustep-base, that's 1.28.0.  But here's where it gets interesting.  Using 
the Debian watch program, the GNUstep FTP server is monitored for new releases. 
 You can see the watch file here: 
https://salsa.debian.org/gnustep-team/gnustep-base/-/blob/master/debian/watch 


There are also branches called `stretch` and `buster` which is the source from 
which the packages in those releases is built.

Debian Salsa should grab the latest release when it hits the FTP server and 
create a new branch.

If you check out that repo and build the package (more details later, but try 
`debuild -uc -us` to start) you should get a working package.  If you don't, 
you need to look in `debian/patches` and see if the patches need to be updated 
or removed to get it to build appropriately.

If you make changes, PLEASE submit a merge request so someone on the GNUstep 
packaging team can review it and include it.

The tool for building packages from the GitLab sources is called `gbp` and is 
in the `git-buildpackage` package.  You will have to do some setup, there is 
documentation.

So, how can you help?

1) Please learn about gbp and look at the repositories to see if 
anything is missing a latest version.  If it is, we need to update the 
CI/DevOps stuff in GitLab to do this automatically.
2) Build and test the latest versions of things.
3) Create new packages for things that don't exist.

My intention is to use these sources to build a new repository of up-to-date 
packages, and add some missing things (libs-xcode, buildtool, and some apps.)  
I have made some progress on this, and intend to get back to it in the new year 
afresh.

The best next-step for us is to maintain a repository (I am volunteering for 
this in the new year) that contains good packages of the latest-released stuff. 
 So people can simply add a new package repository and get latest GNUstep bits.

If you have questions or concerns, please reply in thread.  It will really help 
me finish outlining my documentation for this.

I hope this helps a bit.

Cheers!

-Steven