Non-code code development upstream for estron

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Monday, May 26. 2008

Posted by Neil Williams in Debian

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Non-code code development upstream for estron

As well as choosing a licence, various other non-code or pseudo-code tasks are needed in all upstream projects and I have been working on some of these in my upstream project, estron.

Documentation - Quietly converting the old docs (XML comments) into SGML (docbook content) for use with yelp. Comments have no particular structure so it takes time to add docbook structure to what was just a block of arbitrary text in comment tags.

MIME - Not sure if I've got this right still - I don't see the icon for .estron files and I get a warning when trying to double-click on an "Estron file" (the file type is recognised but gets confused with the XML inside). I'm following code samples from grisbi and drivel to try and get things together.

configuration support - estron will use dbconfig-common in Debian for the internal estron database but I need to set upstream to be able to read in the data created by dbconfig in a non-Debian-only manner, probably using GIO to provide configuration that can include a filename of external config data.

cross build support - a few quibbles in that area but I'll sort them before release. Can help catch architecture-specific problems in the code that would cause a FTBFS on the Debian buildd system.

Other tasks already covered:

make distcheck - important upstream test that simplifies the process of packaging for Debian by ensuring that the distributed tarball really does contain the necessary files and in the right places.

translation support - one little task left for that one, ensuring that applications written in estron support independent translation. Support is in place but not ready for a string freeze at this time.

API documentation - doxygen.

Wiki - ikiwiki

Mailing list - alioth

Access to source code - alioth/debian.

Bug trackers - for upstream, alioth.

I have actually been doing some code too - in QOF due to a bug identified by testing and developing estron and in estron itself to bring 64bit time handling to estron and prevent time overflows in 2038 should you use estron on 32bit machines.

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The mime stuff you added is related to the mailcap system (used by e.g. mutt) and the very old GNOME 1 .applications system. What you probably want is support for the shared-mime-info database. You need a debian/foo.sharedmimeinfo (dh_installmime) file with the description of the MIME type following the shared-mime-info db format. And you want a .desktop file (dh_desktop) in /usr/share/applications following the freedesktop.org .desktop standard.

Here [1] is a collection of links, that can help. If you need further help, you can also mail me in private.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=159685.

#1 Daniel Leidert on 2008-05-26 14:42 (Reply)

Thanks, Daniel - very handy - and thanks for taking the time to look at the changes in SVN. I do have a sharedmimeinfo file and a suitable desktop file but I'm probably not putting them in the right places. I'll dump the rest of the stuff from estron as well as existing projects like deb-gview and quicklist.

#1.1 Neil Williams (Homepage) on 2008-05-26 15:40 (Reply)

Sorry, I did not expect it to be in glade

Please check, what gnomevfs-info (with and without the -s option) thinks about a sample .estron file. A similar program is available for KDE (kmimetypefinder IIRC). It could be possible, that text/xml is not the correct top-class. Maybe you have to change it to be application/xml. But I'm not sure, if it makes a difference (never tested it).

The .desktop files misses a semicolon after the MIME type (mandatory). Icons are normally given without a path and without the extension.

#1.1.1 Daniel Leidert on 2008-05-26 18:24 (Reply)

Think I've fixed it now, thanks. Probably just a mismatch between an XPM file in the .desktop file and .PNG in the mime xml.

#1.1.1.1 Neil Williams (Homepage) on 2008-05-26 18:58 (Reply)

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