Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Not 1.0 release yet, but moving towards it!

Last week I started a discussion with some packagers so we could get ride of lots of outdated and unmaintained repositories as well as updating the maintained repositories so they get improvements from SVN HEAD and also help testing our code.

This was interesting, first packagers did not know each other (even various Ubuntu/E17 package maintainers) so the first task was to get them to talk and settle differences.

Then they complained about trunk often being unstable and hard to get a consistent snapshot to package. While this is true, I also complained about their interaction, or lack of, with developers to know how to build and we agreed that having a public schedule with period to stabilize code base followed by development snapshots could help. So I did propose one monthly plan that people liked, being this weekend (Thursday April 16th) the first freeze followed by a development snapshot on Monday.

The result is turning to be better than what I imagined: all packagers are now united and talking to developers, we set up http://packages.enlightenment.org/ to release packages until they go into mainline distros and we increased SVN commits, with lots of motivated people fixing problems here and there, cutting rough edges and making experience better and better. Now let’s hope during this bug fix weekend we manage to get rock solid EFL and E17 so we can release packages to spread use of our technologies.

Having more people to know and test Enlightenment and its technologies is very important. We’re getting our Release Plan done and expect to release E17 and EFL 1.0 this year. Our project got really interesting Google Summer of Code applications covering Netbook, Browser and other areas were we can rock. But we could use more press releases and marketing, people still don’t know that Enlightenment Technologies power products from phones to home automation systems to mobile media centers and even digital tv set-top boxes around the world!

PS: expect Debian/Ubuntu/SuSE packages for Canola, Enna and other nice applications on top of EFL afterwards. Thanks to all developers and packagers to make it happen!

So here I am at Chicago attending at PyCON USA where I’ll present how Python enabled the development of mobile media center (Canola2) in record time. So far it’s being an amazing conference, lots of interesting talks but more MacOS-X than I’d like to see in a conference about a free software technology (at least we seem to have more Linux than Windows).

As for freedom, free software, mobile media centers and specially Canola2: as announced previously at Maemo community, Canola2 is now opensource (GPLv3)! That’s amazing news, specially to me as I have Canola2 as my baby and would like to have more people involved into its development. It’s not just a great end-user software, it’s an amazing Python platform where you can build all kind of rich user interface.

As you might know, ProFUSION is working with INdT to improve Canola2 and we plan to keep supporting it, starting with some instructions and scripts, see our post for more details. As we want to build a community around it, don’t miss the mailing list and our IRC channel #canola at irc.freenode.net.