Here we are

Long time no blog. My work load during the last three weeks, since we came back from Vilanova, has prevented me from writing anything about what happened there. So 20 days late, here is my summary.

About te BoFs I coordinated:

• BoF on continuous integration for Gnome. It was a clear success. More than 30 people attending (and interested). We managed to get the participation of Thomas Vander Stichele, who has experience using BuildBot for Gstreamer, Frederic Peters, developer of jhAutoBuild, and our José Dapena, who has adapted jhbuild and tinderbox to Gnome. Luis Villa, who had been the continuous integration man for Gnome during the last years, was also there. Thus, as we had the right ingredients, the BuildBrigade (a working group -with already more than 10 members- inside Gnome, in charge of the creation and promotion of an automatic build environment for the project) was created. The general requirements and ideas were agreed during the BoF, and the same afternoon we got together again for deciding about the technical details and the first steps to carry out. I have to say I am very happy with the results of the BoF. Stay tuned! [The slides I used are available here]

• BoF on the development of business applications with/in Gnome. Quite successful. About 20 people attending. We spent 1 hour talking about how the development of business (ERP-like) applications (using Gnome technologies) relate to the development of the Gnome platform. Lorenzo Gil, creator of Gazpacho, Fernando San Martín, developer of PyGestor and a bunch of Fisterra developers were there. Unfortunately other people interested like Johan Dahlin from the projects Kiwi and Stoq, or Murray Cumming from Glom could not make it for the BoF. There are different approaches for the development of that kind of applications, but in general the feeling was that we have things that could -and should- be shared (knowledge, patterns, marketing, widgets, libraries, and so on); also, the feeling was that they could and should be shared probably inside Gnome. The goal now is to create permanent channels for continuing the discussion and finding out what and how we should share results among projects. [The slides I used are available here]

In general I liked the conference very much. My five favorite talks were:

• “Creating Passionate Users” by Kathy Sierra (inspiring, I have added her interesting weblog to my Liferea feeds).
• “How much faster“, by Federico Mena (interesting, giving focus to the whole Gnome project with clear and simple messages).
• “Gnome is people“, by Luis Villa (touching).
• “Women in Free Software“, by Anne Østergaard (Codename: 0:181 Nunca Máis).
• OLPC by Jim Gettys (the social side).

And I should not forgot to mention that we (the marine blue team) won The Other WorldCup with a very effective mix of catenaccio and total football ;-)

Therefore, a lot of new experiences, people, projects and opportunities. I am looking forward to Guadec 2006 in Birmingham (and also to the Guadec Hispana, which will take place a few days before in Granada).

Yesterday I talked about the BoF on continuous integration. Also on Thursday 29th I will be coordinating another BoF on developing software for enterprises with Gnome (10:00-11:00 in the Sala d’Actes).

By “software for enterprises” here we refer to ERP-like software.

From Wikipedia: Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a single unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a single, unified database to store data for the various system modules.

This vertical software can be more or less complex, but it has normally quite a lot of diferences with most of the horizontal desktop applications. It is database-oriented and sometimes needs complex three-tier architectures and is deployed using several machines.

There are some projects related to Gnome (and using Gnome core technologies) that in some way have the business management software as one of their targets:

• Glom: fast development of database oriented applications with a simple architecture.
• Gazpacho: was born to make the development of business applications GUI easier.
• Kiwi / Stoq: framework for creating GUI applications and example business oriented software using it.
• Fisterra: a development framework for creating complex three tier business software using Gnome without needing to reinvent the wheel.
• Other proprietary or non published developments of business software using Gnome.

They follow different approaches but all of them try to make easier the development of business applications using Gnome technologies.

In the BoF, some of the main discussion topics could be:

• Is there anything in GNOME that could be improved in order to make it more friendly for the development of this kind of applications?
• Which are the different approaches for solving the need of that kind of software, and which are the advantages or disadvantages of each of them?
• Should GNOME as a project provide the third party developers with recommendations on how to use the development framework for data oriented applications?
• Should the business management software projects be part of the GNOME project itself or they should be better outside it and leave it as a very desktop oriented project?
• Would it make sense to have a Gnome-BusinessManagementSoftware kind of working group with the usual mailing list, web page,and working agenda?
• And any other topic that the people attending could find interesting.

If you are interested in Gnome not only as a desktop but also as a way of making better (potentially complex) data-oriented applications, you should participate in this BoF :-)
I will be flying to Barcelona in a few hours, see you at Guadec!

On Thursday 29th, during the first day of the Guadec 2006 AfterHours, I will be coordinating a BoF on continuous integration for Gnome (12:00-13:00 in the Sala de Juntes).

Wikipedia defines Continuous Integration as:

Continuous integration is a software engineering term describing a process that completely rebuilds and tests an application frequently.

The contents I propose for the BoF are the following:

• What is continuous integration? Brief definition and explanation of the domain.
• History of CI inside the GNOME project: what has been done historically inside the Gnome project related to CI (e.g. Luis Villa’s MicroTinder).
• Present of CI inside the GNOME project: jhAutoBuild and approaches with Tinderbox2 and Tinderbox3 (we can talk here about what other free software projects do for CI).
• Goals of the continuous integration (Luis has included some ideas on this in the wiki)
• Discussion about the available tools:
• C.I. tools: jhbuild reports, tinderbox, buildbot,…
• Value added tools: check, gcov,…
• Creation of the continuous integration team. Discussion on how the team should be organized and how it relates to other teams (release team, packaging, …).
• Definition of the roadmap for the next year
• Further discussion and hacking

We will have only one hour for all that, but the idea is at least to propose the main topics there and then continue the discussion over lunch and later in the mailing list.

These days I am contacting people that I think could be interested in the BoF. If you know someone that could contribute, please send him a link to this post :-)

And consider yourself invited to come and share your view on how continuous integration for Gnome should be!

The poster is available in pdf format. The press release can be found here.

As I had explained before, we had submitted three talks for the Guadec 2006. A couple of weeks ago we received an answer from the program committee saying that all were discarded for the Guadec Core (the main part of the conference, Monday to Wednesday). For the BoFs it was already what I expected, they fit better in the After Hours (Thursday and Friday), but as we did not receive any explanation about why the Fisterra talk was not considered interesting, we requested that information in the mailing lists:

Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 10:42:57 +0200
From: Juan José Sánchez Penas
Cc: guadec-papers@gnome.org, guadec-list
Subject: Re: [guadec-list] Acceptance mails sent

…

After receiving rejections for two BoFs, I have two questions:

a) Wouldn’t be a good idea to send together with the rejections an explanation of why the talk/bof/whatever got rejected? It is a bit frustrating to receive just the notification without knowing why it was not interesting for the selection committee. Knowing the reason would also help in order to propose better talks for future Gnome conferences.

…

We have not received any answer yet, and I am completely sure it is because of the lack of time, but I still think the authors would appreciate a lot some extra feedback from the committee.

Anyway, we decided to re-submit the Fisterra talk proposal for the Guadec Hispana in the WarmupWeekend (Saturday and Sunday) and the two BoFs for the AfterHours, and they all have been accepted and are now officially scheduled:

• Fisterra: sharing efforts for developing business management software with Gnome, Saturday 24th, at 17:30 (now in Spanish, as part of the Guadec-es).
• Development of software for entreprises with Gnome will be Thursday 29th, at 10:00.
• Continuous integration for GNOME, Thursday 29th, at 12:00.

You can see the final schedule at the conference webpage.

The slides I used in my talks at the aLANtejo 2005 have been finally published in the webpage of the conference:

• Gnome project introduction, tutorial and Gnome Love. (In Portuguese)
• Gnome: differences with the KDE project. (In Portuguese)

This year the event is going to take place 20-22 of October in Évora, Portugal.

Two small but very interesting documents have been published recently in the community webpage of Igalia:

• Tinderbox/scratchbox integration: a short guide intended for helping developers to build a continuous integration environment with the scratchbox cross-compilation toolkit and some of the Mozilla Webtools. Scratchbox is used, among others, by Nokia in the Maemo platform.
• XPTracker/TWiki vs. Trac: compares two web-based project management tools: XPTracker and Trac. The first one is a Twki plugin based on the eXtreme Programming development methodology, while the second one is based on ticket tracking.

All kind of comments, suggestions and contributions are very welcome.

From Igalia, we have submitted 3 talk/BoF proposals for the next Guadec, that will take place in less than two months in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Catalonia:

• Fisterra: sharing efforts for developing business management software with Gnome
  
• Development of software for entreprises with Gnome
• Continuous integration for GNOME

All have been provisionally placed in the skeleton schedule (the first two are part of the core Guadec days, and the third is proposed for the After Hours Workshops, during the last two days of the conference).

In a few days the committee will confirm which proposals are finally accepted.

Someone asked me some weeks ago for a complete list of all the software I daily use (as a laptop user, not as a developer, because that is a different business), so here it is:

• Desktop: Gnome/Metacity/Nautilus
• RSS reader: Liferea
• IM: Gaim
• IRC: Xchat
• Browser: Firefox
• Newsreader: Pan
• E-mail: Mutt (work) & Evolution (personal e-mail)
• Music: Muine & Banshee
• Notes: Tomboy
• CD/DVD Toaster: gnomebaker
• Digital camera: gtkam
• Docs&slides: LaTeX & OOo
• Bibtex: JavRef
• Spreadsheet: gnumeric
• Fast Editing: Jed, Vi, Gedit
• Editing: Emacs
• P2P: aMule, gnome-btdownload, nicotine
• Podcast: iPodder
• PM: Planner
• PDF/PS: Evince & acroread & gv
• Pics: Gimp, F-spot, Gthumb, eog
• Movies: Totem, mplayer
• Internet voice conference: skype

I use other programs now and then, but this is the complete list of the ones I currently depend on. Some of them I have been using for years, some others I have just discovered. Most of them are part of the Gnome project. Most of them are GTK based.

I only use daily two proprietary pieces of software: acroread because I need to read some PDFs still not supported by Evince or other free readers; and skype because I save a lot of money, when travelling, using skypeout.

I will do again the same list next year by the same month in order to check how stable I am selecting my software.

As I already blogged here, in October past year I was invited to Évora, in order to participate in a round table about “Gnome vs. KDE”. In my first slide I suggested that in my opinion a more adjusted title for the round table would have been “Free Desktops vs Proprietary Desktops”. I think fights between projects that have less than 5% of the global market is not very clever and only gives advantages to the real adversary. Specially when the projects have almost the same goals.

Well, fortunately a lot of people think this way, and that is why almost 6 years ago, in March 2000, the FreeDesktop.org project was started. During these years, the best ideas from the different Desktop projects were progressively moved to the shared software infrastructure. New projects have also been created there to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Early this year, a new project was announced to share efforts between the free software Desktop projects: Freedesktop Promotion. This time collaboration is going to happen also in the marketing area. The motivations are very well explained in this article.