Will’s Miro dev blog

I built and posted Miro 2.0 rc1 builds in the sticky section of the nightlies page (http://pculture.org/nightlies).

We have a set of pre-release 2.0 release notes that still need updating but are pretty up-to-date at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Please post any bugs to http://bugzilla.pculture.org/ with the version as 2.0-rc1. Please include as much information as possible. See GoodBugReports for more details.

To put this in some context, this is a HUGE release for us. We’ve been working hard on Miro 2.0 since May or thereabouts. It’s good to get to the end of the development cycle. At the same time, there are things we’re leaving on the table that we’ll address in future versions.

Last call for translation help–if you’re a translator and familiar with Launchpad, we could use your help! https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy.

I want to send a huge thank you for all the people who have contributed to Miro development thus far especially people I’ve worked with like Alex, Uwe, Keith, Pan, Robbt, Sedat, Lukasz, Arvid, Elmargol, and others.

Also, thank you to my life partner, Sadie, who has put up with me fixing bugs and doing a release candidate on my birthday.

Finally, happy birthday to me! w00t!

I imported translation updates today. Anything done in since the 22nd should be available in tonight’s nightlies.

Since I originally posted this cry for help four days ago, twelve of the languages have been edited.

We now have four completed translations:

• German
• Finnish
• Slovenian
• Norwegian Nynorsk

Bravo!

We’ve got five more that are getting close:

• Norwegian Bokmal
• Polish
• French
• Swedish
• Spanish

The rest of the languages have more than 100 untranslated strings.

If there’s anything I can do to help you out, let me know. If you know anyone else that can help with translations, I sure would appreciate the help!

https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer

We’ve been pushing hard on Miro 2.0 development for a long time now. So far I’ve avoided making release date predictions, but looking at the Bugzilla queue and the rate at which we’re finishing things, we’re probably looking at a Miro 2.0 release in the next 3 or 4 weeks.

One thing that we desperately need help with is translation work. All translation work is done in Launchpad at https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer. You can see the status of translations there, too. Right now it looks something like this:

language    # untranslated strings
--------    ----------------------
German      0 (Go German!)
Slovenian   28
Polish      39
Swedish     58
French      66

The rest of the languages have more than 100 untranslated strings.

I want to thank Lukasz, who’s been working on the Polish translations, for helping an enormous amount in the last few weeks. He’s identified and helped me fix a bunch of problems with the strings and also worked to make the strings easier to translate. Thank you!

If you can translate strings and/or have done Launchpad translations before, we need your help. We’ve got a 3 or 4 week window between now (January 22nd 2009) and a release. It’s not a lot of time, but hopefully it’s enough time for us all to get translations into a better state.

If you have any questions or find any problems, let me know.

I saw Chip’s blog entry announcing Parasite yesterday and checked it out. I had problems getting it to work with Miro, but he has since fixed the bug I was bumping into.

I think this will be a really useful tool, so I’m doing a short write up of how to use Parasite with Miro.

1. Grab Parasite from git compile and install it. Instructions are on the Parasite web-site.
2. When you run make install It’ll install libgtkparasite.so into /usr/local/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/ .
3. Launch Miro like this:

   LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/ GTK_MODULES=parasite ./run.sh
   

That’ll launch Miro with Parasite showing you the widget hierarchy and widget properties and all that.

There’s a screencast on the Parasite site that shows off more things you can do.