F-Blog

Again, some time passed since last post. Job is taking more time than usual, causing my lazyness to overcome my will to write!
But anyway, here we are. In the meantime Gnome moved to git, and so F-Spot followed. This pleased a lot the main devs, which were already using it since time.
F-Spot have been depending on bleeding edge components for long time (read gtk-sharp). This caused leakage of interest among a lot of contributors, which didn’t want to mess up their system with unstable software.
Now, thanks to sde’s effort, this obstacle has passed over!! F-Spot’s git master can now compile with acceptable deps, i.e. nothing not present in Ubuntu Jaunty, released last april. That’s great, isn’t it? (to be precise on requirements, you will need gtk-sharp 2.12.2 and mono 2.0.0).

Git is very powerful, but I bet you all already know. Git speeds up collaborative development, and makes merge of patches much easier than Subversion.
This, and less restrictive requirements, raised back attraction to higher, deserved standards.
And here comes Gitorious, a very powerful git-based platform which allows contributors to freely express their fantasy, and still keeping easy the merge of those fantasies into F-Spot’s master. And really, it already helped, you can see it yourself: new (and old!) patches got merged, many new branches born (some were already merged in), two clones present! And most of this doesn’t come from main devs only! Wonderful, isn’t it? (Well, I know I’m getting quite repetitive, but it’s really exciting, and I’m very happy of it.)

Come and feel free to join development on gitorious, which is kept up to date with Gnome thanks to RubenV.
I’m happy to see things moving again, and I’m happy to invite everyone join and enjoy F-Spot again, on gitorious or anywere else, to help this project towards the long awaited next release.
Just to let you know how things are moving, Tigger is uniforming and empowering IconView, Piz is improving visual experience, Ruben is preparing his GSoC summer job on RAW image handling, Sde works in the background to make F-Spot buildable, usable, stable and most enjoyable possible. Yes, he’s our superhero.
Free adv: it’s not breaking news, but he also has his own never updated blog at reblochon. Be sure not to miss it!

So come, join, discuss and contribute!

(and have some patience )

P.S. on a side note, a bug emerged in last Ubuntu Jaunty. Well, two at least annoying bugs:

1. F-Spot placing imported photos to home folder instead under Photos (or whatever) directory: this is an Ubuntu only bug, and you can track it on launchpad.
2. Editing a tag’s icon doesn’t allow you to view all the associated photos: this is a regression in Gtk+ 2.16, which was fixed in master but obviously not in Ubuntu. You can track it on launchpad.