GOOD WORK TEAM

NOW GET BACK OUT THERE

Almost time to close up shop on this blog and migrate one more time. Might end up moving to E.org after that if I can tolerate not being able to link external images/videos, but it seems doubtful.

Pre-release tarballs are up and the packagers so far have been showing all green lights, so now it’s just a case of waiting for a while longer and then figuring out what to write for the release announcement.

I’ve started writing blog posts a number of times over the past several days, but each time I’ve gotten distracted and didn’t finish. Focus time. Head in the game. Hoooo.

As I announced on the release mailing list, there’s going to be another E18 thingy this week.

What I didn’t announce, because I was waiting on some other things, is that E18 is releasing. For this special one-time event, I’ve chosen the one year anniversary of the last time we had nice things.

E18 Release: 21 December 2013

Feel free to share, this isn’t supposed to be a secret.

I promised a longer post today, except I don’t really have much to write about since I’ve been sleeping most of the day and I already wrote everything here in the RC2 release announcement. This is not a great week for readers of my blog, but it has been a great week for naps. I guess that’s something?

Minor blizzards are expected to strike over the weekend, so maybe I’ll use that time to come up with something to write about other than release stuff. Except that this is a release blog. And I already ranted about systray once, so I can’t do that again. Hoo boy.

Brief update today, I’ll do a longer one tomorrow.

I’ve been sick(er) this week; can’t seem to shake this thing I’ve had for the past month. Spending a lot of time sleeping.

RC2 probably going out tomorrow.

As many have noted, there’s been a considerable amount of mailing list neckbearding going on regarding releases. In the midst of all this, Stefan Schmidt, successfully executed a point release for EFL, which features a number of important fixes. Or maybe it fixes a number of important features? Tough call, maybe I’ll call my buddy who knows a few things about fixes and features.

Aside from doing a great job, he also followed through on a small task from me: putting out the E18 RC1 tarball. I figured it might be a good idea to put these releases out together, and here we have them.

Some changes since the last release:

• Option for toggling startup splash screen is back (Settings->Theme)
• Theme setting works again
• Winlist no longer sometimes gets stuck on the last item
• suid wrapper now clears out most environment variables (@raster)
• Pulseaudio now starts automatically from mixer
  • unless option for disabling it is set (@jeyzu)
• Menus no longer crash in hard-to-trigger cases when opening against screen edges
• Fixes for input on borderless maximized windows
• DND operations no longer sometimes permanently block mouse input after
• Filemanager desktop view no longer hardcoded to “custom”
• Enable filemanager icon selections that start between icons
• NoDisplay .desktop files are no longer displayed by Everything launcher
• Filemanager toolbars can no longer be changed
• ChangeLog/NEWS files updated
• Fixed gadget dragging on non-primary screen shelves
• Fixed gadget dragging on shelves to not randomly reorder gadgets
• Menu DND operations are now functional again
• Compositor render grab now disabled by default
• Filemanager popup geometry improved when triggering in windows
• Backlight levels are now saved after action use
• Physics module removed

With regard to the physics module, I wrote this last year mainly to see if it was possible. It was. I’m not sure why I put it in core at that time, but I did. Since then, it hasn’t been touched aside from updating it to newer Ephysics API. I’ve moved it to a separate repo on git in the event that I or someone else wants to pick it up at some point.

Anyway, RC1 is out! I don’t have any more bugs that I’m targeting for this release, so unless I get some showstoppers I might be unleashing this monster pretty soon…

Another day without much to talk about, but exciting news to compensate:

• Fixed a bug where gadgets on shelves on non-primary monitors were impossible to move
• Fixed the “impossible” to fix bug where gadgets on shelves would randomly reorder themselves

RC1 is the next E18 pre-release, stay tuned…

Seriously. I don’t think anyone can handle this update. It’s packed with too much energy and I’m just so stoked to write it here we go.

I made a small change to block the showing of NoDisplay .desktop files in evry.

I then proceeded to remove the ability to add/remove/change gadgets in the EFM toolbar. They say that there are no bad ideas in E-land, but “they” are wrong.

I spent a long while going through commits and updating changelog files. You know a release is close when people start pretending to care about these.

Lastly, I put in some time trying to reproduce a number of bug reports. Unsuccessfully. For all of them.

Tune in tomorrow for another thrilling episode of The Exciting Life Of A Release Manager.

We’re nearing release, so this blog (and my daily work) will only be as interesting as the number of bugs that I can reproduce and fix.

Today I got a crazy bug report from a user who claimed his E would go to a black screen whenever he opened a menu. Reading the report was the most exciting part of my day since I was unable to reproduce it.

In other news, I did a lot of paperwork and so the below video is relevant:

Apparently they tweaked the admin UI again for no reason.

For those who aren’t in the know, EFL 1.8 was released yesterday. It was then subsequently re-released as EFL 1.8.1 due to some QA issues with packaging. It’s been over a year since the last EFL major release, so this is long overdue. No, we didn’t forget how to do releases.

A lot has happened over the past several days. I know your time is valuable, so here’s the short version:

• Window menus now more reliably move windows between virtual desktops
• E17 upgrades now load the composite configuration module automatically if the composite module was enabled
• Fixed window display with desktop profile enabled
• Some cases of shaded windows receiving mouse events have been fixed
• Teamwork now ignores HTTP 301 instead of looping infinitely
• Alpha4 release
• Startup splash can once again be disabled
  • Also fixed theme changing in general
• Removed another instance of old “raise on focus” behavior
• Winlist (Alt+Tab) now performs as expected in all cases instead of sometimes doing nothing
• Physics gravity settings fixed by Olaf Conradi
• Suid security improved, crazy methods for performing system actions now broken
• Mixer now successfully starts pulseaudio (unless you’re Italian; sorry Davide!)
• Menus no longer sometimes cause crashes when opening them against a screen edge
• Borderless windows no longer sometimes fail to realize that they are borderless
• Fullscreen windows don’t sometimes get other windows stuck on top when compositing is disabled for them
• I ate an entire turkey by myself
• DND operations now always clear their input window, fixing mouse input after
• Everything (the launcher, not the concept) no longer crashes when navigating between views
• EFM allows grid views on desktop once again
• EFM icon interaction area is now smaller, making it easier to create selections
• Pointer-based focus model users will no longer experience “leaks” in their windows between the titlebar and window content
• GST generic loaders are once again functional and no longer hang infinitely when processing audio files

It’s getting into release season…