Work stuff

Biggest work-related news: I've been adjusted to full-time status. Which basically means I get paid more but I also get yelled at more. Hey, I'll take the cashola! Various stuff I've been doing - last week I spent a couple of days bussing around Vancouver handing out One CDs (and Mandriva pens) to members of the local LUG. They seemed pleased. Bug squad work is going well: largely through the efforts of Pacho Ramos (gold star for Pacho!), we've reduced the total of UNCONFIRMED bugs in the MDV Bugzilla from around 4000 to 1000, and we're still trucking. Once the backlog is cleared, we can start concentrating on triaging all new bugs. I need to make a couple of simplifications to the bug policy, then it will be out of draft status. Stephane Teletchea has been looking at some scripts for generating regular bug status reports, which will be great. We've got a pretty cool project on the go to make a splash at GUADEC and aKademy, both of which are coming up fairly soon. More details to come :) Development stuff: I've been carrying on my trawl through outdated packages in /main, and I'm nearly done with the stuff that hasn't been updated since Mandriva Linux 2006 or earlier now. Aside from that, today I did quite a lot of work related to bug 22775, which is about mc: our mc package was hardcoded for various helper apps, some of which weren't packaged in MDV at all. I have packaged all the necessary helper apps that weren't previously packaged (all that are still available and buildable, anyway). I also patched it to build against slang2. More controversially (I expect), I replaced a lot of calls to particular helper apps with calls to xdg-open (at least while X is running). This opens the preferred app for a given file type, as defined by either the user or the running desktop environment. mc users tend to be quite passionate about mc, so this change may provoke some discussion. it's in cooker /main/testing for now, in case it turns out to be unpopular, but I hope it's a change we can keep and refine for the next release. Also put up an article on creating music on Mandriva, written by Helio, one of our Brazilian team who works on the KDE team. He has a little musical sideline and he wrote up a great step-by-step guide to making music with nothing but apps available in Mandriva. I proofed it, formatted it and posted it up on the Club. It's definitely worth a read. I think I'll need to start working on the next newsletter soon...