It Will be Boring for a While
(but in a good way)
While there is no exciting new bling to talk about this week, there are plenty of bugfixes to be had for this Unity release. This week the team welcomes Nico van der Walt as he makes his introduction fixing Bug #731212: “Applications” and “Files & Folders” keyboard shortcut overlays not drawn correctly with scalable launcher and Bug #741346: superkey shortcut labels does not scale properly.
“The Ubuntu community is a big inspiration for me and I love how friendly everyone is. Unity will be a big success and I look forward to being a part of this great Linux distribution.”
Also this week we have Andreas Richel submitting his first fix for implementing a more robust method of launching applications from the home view (lp:730623). Unfortunately his camera is broken so no picture, but he sends along “I’m a 20-year-old German computer science student in my 6th semester. I’ve been passively following Ubuntu and the bug trackers for some time now, but was unable to find enough time to dig into an ongoing open source project. So this really is a first for me :)”
Also back this week are veterans Marco Biscaro and Andrea Azzarone, fixing Bug #742985 ‘Lenses with no shortcut still display black box when pressing super key’ and Bug #741775 ‘Launcher icon progress-bar too big for a 32px launcher’.
These two are like clocks, something landing almost every week!
Wait, more Bugs?
This week the list is up to 39 bugs, a new high. Now you might be thinking “Wait a minute, I thought all these brilliant people were doing awesome, how can the list of bugs go UP!?!” As it turns out, there have been about 50 bitesize bugs fixed so far (the green line):
What happens is at the beginning the bugs aren’t really bitesize since a bunch of plumbing work is going on. Towards the tail end as we get towards the polishing phase it’s easier to nick off and fix bitesize bugs, especially as more and more people are able to run it the closer you get to the Beta milestone.
If anything, the list of bitesize bugs will probably continue to grow, especially when Unity goes into another feature phase after Natty. However as you can see the green “Fix Released” line, the number of bugs being fixed also goes up as the code matures and is exposed to more people who want to hack on it. The slow march towards progress continues.
Other Unity Updates
(from the Desktop Team Report)
- As usual, Unity (and related components) released last Thursday, ready for beta (3.6.8) + some bug fixes cherry-picked crash fixes for the beta freeze.
- This week, we got, in addition to a lot of bug fixes:
- Multitouch full support handling. If you didn’t test it and you have a supported hardware, you should probably give it a try, the handles (that you can activate by ccsm and a keybinding) are just… gorgeous!
- Introduction of a pending waiting for approval “fade and slide” effect when hovering the bfb (in experimental plugin settings) that may be set by default.
- Some keynav better handling in both the launcher and the dash, as well as Quicklist having now the title name in the Quicklist (as in maverick)
- Launcher now responds to theme change!
- Under the cover, a rewrite of the Hide behavior machine enabling more effective automated tests.
- New Zeigeist synced with debian to get in sync with the latest debian stack
- Some new compiz uploads to fix miscellanous issues, like more invisible window fixes, Alt + Tab fixes, some redrawing issues and autorespawn on crash
For people found of the full story, the now classic link: https://launchpad.net/unity/3.0/3.6.8
How to Get Involved
1. Get the Code
Follow the Step by Step Instructions and Wiki Page. This will get the code from Launchpad, set up your development environment, and getting you used to the Launchpad workflow.
2. Pick a bug
Here’s the full list if you want to find more, feel free to just grab one, assign it to yourself, mark it in progress and get started.
3. Fix your bug and then get your code into Unity
Don’t worry we won’t leave you hanging, you can get a-hold of a Unity developer through many different ways:
- #ayatana on freenode IRC during European and American workdays. Or you can post to the mailing list if you have a question.
- We also have weekly IRC Q+A for any developer who wants to dive in and ask a Unity developer. 7pm-8pm UTC (That’s 2pm EST) every Friday!
Remember you can read all of Jorge’s previous Bitesize Bug Reports™ by following the Bitesize tag.