GUADEC 2012, A Coruña

This will be my first GUADEC, and I'm looking forward to it. Thanks to my employer Collabora for sponsoring this trip!

I'll be around from 25th evening to 30th morning. Hope to see you all there. :)

Wired, headline click area

Something has always bothered me about the story links on Wired magazine's home page. Today it bothered me enough to write about it.

I don't know if they do this on purpose, or whether it's just an oversight. If it's on purpose, I'd love to know the reason why.

So here's a story; and I hover over the text:

There you go, it lights up and I can click on it… Oops! I moved my mouse by just a few pixels, and:

Ew, I missed! I can't click on it any more.

Fitts' law, my friends, is being violated. Why are they making it harder for me to click on their headlines?

Ars Technica doesn't seem to have this problem. No matter where I hover inside a headline, it still lights up as a link, and I can click to view it:

The difference comes because Ars Technica surrounds the entire span with the hyperlink anchor, whereas Wired only surrounds the text.

I find this somewhat upsetting.

An unintended gem about usability

<UU> Somedays, I think why can't we have computers which just work.
<UU> But then I remember that I am a Computer Scientist.
<UU> So, yeah, I guess I understand why.
<Nirbheek> :D

Quite related to GNOME, really.

GNOME 3 on Gentoo and related news

As those of you who follow the Gentoo GNOME Overlay know, GNOME 3 is shaping up nicely in the overlay, and runs according to upstream's intentions quite well. Whatever is missing should be filed as a bug and will be taken care of. :-)

Now that it's been a few days since the release cycle entered UI freeze, we have been able to evaluate whether or not you folks (i.e., our users), will be able to transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 without too much pain. We came to the conclusion that there is no particular hurry to let go of GNOME 2.32, and that we should wait for things to settle down before unleashing GNOME 3 on our users.

Hence, this blog post serves as a notice for all Gentoo GNOME users about the fact that the addition of the latest GNOME to ~arch in the Gentoo portage tree will be delayed much more than usual. People who wish to be early-birds and try out GNOME 3 (and help with bugs!) should check out the Gentoo GNOME Overlay (layman -a gnome).

One of the reasons for this is that besides the inevitable (temporary) feature regressions, parts of the design of GNOME 3 are still a work-in-progress, and some of the existing designs aren't fully implemented yet. For instance, file management is currently in a half-way state, network-manager-applet is still being used, and the fallback mode needs work. In addition, a11y support in GNOME Shell is incomplete, and from what I can make out, it's not in a "shippable" state.

However, the list will definitely change before the final release. Things are in a fluid state at the moment, with upstream maintainers working hard at fixing bugs before the final freeze (you should help them in this!).

Another reason for the delay is that the influx of GNOME 3 libraries which need to be installed alongside GNOME 2 libraries means that the dependencies of a lot of in-tree ebuilds need to be adjusted. This is mostly straightforward work; except where slotting of libraries was not feasible, and porting to GTK+3 will need to be done. To ease the transition, and allow porting, GNOME 3.0 will probably be added to the tree hard-masked, or stay in the overlay till the work is done.

Looking at how things are moving, the upper limit for when GNOME 3 will get added to the ~arch tree is the 3.2 release. I have a personal stake in this, since I particularly love GTK+3, GSettings, GDBus, and GNOME Shell. I somehow feel an OCD need to see everything ported away from GTK+2/GConf/dbus-glib/bonobo/libunique towards GTK+3/GSettings/GDBus/GtkApplication. :D

In related news, thanks to the efforts of Amadeusz Żołnowski (aidecoe), Plymouth is now in the tree! I tried it out, and it seems to work quite well. I'd love to see the Gentoo community create more Gentoo-centric themes for it. The absence of Larry the Cow was sorely felt. :-)

Some of you may remember my last blog post, which was about systemd on Gentoo. Fellow dev Greg KH has taken up the mantle of getting systemd into the tree. Thanks to everyone on the bug report for making systemd work on Gentoo, and thanks to Greg for volunteering to get it into the tree!

Here's to a very exciting 2011 year!

Systemd in Gentoo

A lot of folks are raving about the next generation in init systems (aka systemd), and how it's (almost certainly) going to be the default init system for Fedora 14 (paid article, subscribe to LWN to read! [or wait a week]). It also seems that OpenSuse will be moving to systemd sometime in the near future (don't take my word for this though), and Debian has at least considered it. It is also well-known that Ubuntu will not be using systemd for the foreseeable future.

So where is Gentoo in all this? Our current init system is baselayout-1 in the stable tree, and openrc in the ~arch tree. The maintainer-wanted bug for systemd has been quite active with users posting preliminary ebuilds for it. The bug itself currently has >30 folks CCed (including me), and 86 votes. So users are definitely very interested in seeing systemd in Gentoo. However, it will take a lot of work before systemd can enter portage even as a masked ebuild.

Even after systemd enters portage, it is extremely unlikely that it will become the default init system for reasons that are listed below. Some developers are strongly in favour of moving from baselayout-1 to systemd, while some think it's a pile of crap that Gentoo should stay far away from. Neither of these opinions is shared by the majority of Gentoo devs. (that includes me :-)

In all likelihood, the end result will be that openrc will finally go stable (replacing baselayout-1), and if any developers are willing to spend the massive amount of time and effort required to make systemd usable in Gentoo, systemd will become an optional init system, strongly recommended for desktops/laptops.

Now why can't we throw out baselayout-1 as well as openrc and just use systemd? I was going to make a full list of the reasons, but as I was making it, I realised that I don't know enough details about systemd's requirements, what all it provides, what parts of Baselayout would need to be rewritten, how much porting of the tree (and systemd) would be needed, etc. So instead of hand-waving, I'll just list "needs several volunteer developers" as the blocker for now :)

I'm tempted to list myself as a future volunteer, but I won't do such a thing yet. Rest assured that if I do end up working on this, I'll be sure to blog about it. Although it is probably just a matter of "time" ;)