Monday, June 07, 2010

Hackweek V - Day 1

It is Hackweek V here at Novell. And as with all good things that are supposed to start on Monday, and end on Friday, the best thing is that they can start on Friday evening and go until the night becomes a dawn on Monday morning. It is in this spririt that I started to do some preparation to the long overdue release of libwpd libwpg and all projects that are depending on these two. Already during the week-end I fixed some obvious regressions in libwpg, caused by the complete API rewrite. I added some callbacks to the libwpd's API, so that we can try to support named styles during the 0.9.x series and will not have to break ABI too soon (libwpd 0.8.x were API stable for about 5 years). And today, I was playing with some more regressions and bugs found by sum1, the best QA person that I know.

The fun part for libwpg was to somehow start to support elliptical arcs so that some graphs can have nice smooth edges. This is when one converts the WPG files to SVG. Another fun was generating ODG. Although the ODF 1.1 specifications somehow allow to have elliptical arcs in a path, the reference implementation of ODF does not render them. Needless to say that it is pretty tedious task to try to compute a proper bounding box for a path that has only one elliptical element. Just wondering whether ODG can ever become so easy to use and as expressive as SVG. Never mind, just ranting!

The other thing that I wanted to work on during hackweek was the Evolution installer that I spoke about some time ago. Nonetheless, it would be not wise (the less one can say) to put that as a principal task for oneself. Unless, one is crazy in love with progress-bars and enjoys staring at them for 15-20 minutes in row. But, I can report some progress in there. It is now possible to install only the languages one wants, although that functionality must be somehow fine-tuned so that we don't publish languages where only one of the *.mo files is present. Another little work was done in order to make the installer Welcome page a bit more sexy.

For those that would like to debug Evolution on Windows, there is now a debug installer in the dummy rpm file that I mentioned in my previous blog post. This debug installer will install the debug symbols for all DLLs and EXEs in the Evolution installer and will add also a working gdb.exe as a courtesy of your faithful.

Last, but not least, I would like to announce officially that a 64-bit evolution starts and work on a 64-bit Windows operating system. It can even show some fancy blog entries. Please, don't focus on the content, or lack thereof :-P, rather enjoy the nice picture) of rss plugin using 64-bit version of webkit-gtk.