Tag - thesis - Jannis Pohlmann

Tuesday, September 8 2009

Long Overdue Update

By Jannis Pohlmann on Tuesday, September 8 2009, 01:17

I haven't posted anything in a while, but I'm not complaining. The last month I've been mostly busy pretending to be busy. Ok, to be honest, that's not entirely true. Over at Xfce, we have achieved a lot in August:

We've moved all Xfce repositories (including the goodies) over to Git. Kudos to Brian for doing most of the work.
All Xfce translation updates are now submitted via Transifex. Thanks to the Transifex developers for all the support and for being such a friendly bunch. It amazes me that Dimitris, the founder of Indifex, is also active on our translations mailing list to support people!
The migration of the Thunar core to GIO is complete and has been merged into the main development branch. The overall delta was 2.9MB, although admittedly, a big part of that is due to the removal of ThunarVFS, so I can only take credit for about 16,000 of the 24,335 insertions and 6,000 of the 41,356 deletions.
We've kicked off the Xfce 4.8 development cycle on August 16th. The schedule and all other details are available on the wiki. Xfce 4.8 is scheduled for April 12th, 2010. Expect development releases of the various core components soon!

Other things I've been planning to blog about but didn't have the time to:

Samuel is still busy setting up Buildbot. With less time than he had hoped for at hands this might still take a while.
I was provided with a free Linutop 2 in June. I'd like to thank the Linutop company again for this gift! So far, I've only found the time to give it a few test boots but I'm planning to set it up as a Xfce test machine soon. Its limited hardware makes it much better platform than my rather powerful laptop and/or virtual machines for testing the speed and memory demand of Xfce.
My thesis is progressing slowly. I think I have at least 3/4 finished now. I'll keep you posted about the result. I'm hoping to kick off the six month learning phase for my final exams before October because a friend of mine is already waiting for me. ;)

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Tuesday, June 16 2009

Preview: Browsing SFTP with Thunar

By Jannis Pohlmann on Tuesday, June 16 2009, 02:40

It feels like I'm finally getting somewhere. My GIO migration branch of Thunar now generates thumbnails using the D-Bus service provided by Tumbler (which is still in development but almost ready for a release). It has no references to ThunarVFS anymore, except for one function required by Thunarx, the Thunar extension library. The next step will be to prepare thunarx-2 with a ThunarVFS-free API. All plugins shipped with Thunar itself need to be updated. ThunarVFS will be moved out of the Thunar tarball and into its own, so that applications depending on it will still work. And then we only need to fork the HAL based volume monitor from GVfs and of course thunar-volman needs to be rewritten on top of GIO ...

Anyway, just a few moments ago, I did something I thought is worth sharing: I browsed one of our servers remotely over SFTP! Mounting still needs to be done from the terminal but after that, you can simply type in the SSH or SFTP URI and it will display its contents. Thumbnails are generated over D-Bus. Here's a screenshot:

Update

Thunar can now mount remote URIs on demand:

FTP browsing also works:

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Friday, June 5 2009

News Update

By Jannis Pohlmann on Friday, June 5 2009, 01:25

A lot of things are going on lately and it turns out I'm way to busy to update my weblog on a regular basis. So, this is just a short post to keep you all updated.

Last two weeks

I took a new student job at the university, at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, which I love most. I'll be working on haplotyping algorithms.
I went to Barcelona and had a great time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit overall. Stephan and I were very productive. One evening during dinner we discussed our development and release process and later started writing it down. The result is a beautiful document that still needs a bit of polishing. I hope it'll serve as a good foundation for the development and release process of Xfce in the future. Several others commented on it and it looks like we'll give the proposed concept a shot after we've switched to git and all that.
Even though the week in Barcelona was great for Xfce, I was disappointed with how it went with regards to the cooperation between Xubuntu and Xfce. I talked it through with Stephan and after I got back, I resigned from my position as the Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison.

At the moment

I've started to implement the so-called thumbnail management D-Bus specification. My implementation is called Tumbler and it will hopefully start serving thumbnails for other apps soon. I'm planning to use it in Thunar, Stephan has expressed interest in using it in Ristretto and when discussing the specification and the existing hildon-thumbnail implementation, Philip van Hoof told me that Hildon/Nokia might be interested in dropping hildon-thumbnail in favor of Tumbler if it's flexible enough. I'm working on it as much as I can and I'm hoping to do a release within the next few weeks.
I'm still working on the Transifex installation for Xfce. It's already running but I still need to import all the projects, releases and of course create accounts for maintainers automatically.
The migration of Xfce to Git is still work in progress. Brian has most of the repository issues sorted out and is now waiting for me to finish the commit mail script. I have two or three possible implementations lying around but I need to have a look at that again.
Jim needs the documentation repository next week, so I'm about to set it up.
Our Buildbot server has arrived in Sweden. Today I set up the firewall. Samual is taking care of setting up the Buildbot host VM and other things. We're considering to move a lot of the services not related to development (like the Xfce websites) into separate VMs on that server too, in order to make the current server a development-only machine.

Besides that I'm trying to catch up with the work and personal stuff that piled up while I was away last week. And I really should go and sleep.

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Friday, May 1 2009

Another Thunar/GIO Status Update

By Jannis Pohlmann on Friday, May 1 2009, 02:44

I'm more or less done with migrating the volume management code in Thunar to GIO. As of today there's not a single reference to ThunarVfsVolume or ThunarVfsVolume manager in Thunar anymore. While that is pretty neat and another thing I can mark as (almost) done, there are a few quirks also:

There's no way to find out whether a volume is removable or not. Actually, there are APIs for that but they don't seem to yield reasonable results for any of my USB and DVD drives.
GIO doesn't handle repeatedly issued mount requests too well. If you try mounting a DVD volume several times in a row, you'll end up G_IO_ERROR_FAILED errors exposing private D-Bus error messages. That's nothing the user should be bothered with but unfortunately there's no way to avoid this. G_IO_ERROR_FAILED is an error type you normally want to display. I think in this case raising a G_IO_ERROR_PENDING would be more appropriate.

So what's next? I'll just pick the list from my last post because I'm lazy:

Move the thumbnail related code into exo.
Load ThunarFile objects asynchronously. This will be a pain. A lot of functions will have to be split up to fit into the asynchronous concept.
Migrate Thunarx to GIO.
Migrate thunar-volman to GIO.
Integrate functionality similar to Gigolo (remote/virtual places management) into the file manager.
Write GNOME-independent GIO extensions for volume management and the trash.

I'm not so sure I want to load ThunarFiles asynchronously. It'll only work in some situations anyway. However, the possibility of the loading process blocking the GUI is quite high, especially with remote mounts. I guess the next thing I'll work on (next week) is moving thumbnailing out of Thunar and into exo.

Oh, by the way, here are some boring stats of my work in the past four weeks:

 thunar/Makefile.am                      |   44 +-
 thunar/main.c                           |    8 +
 thunar/thunar-abstract-icon-view.c      |    4 -
 thunar/thunar-application.c             |  655 +++++++--------
 thunar/thunar-application.h             |   25 +-
 thunar/thunar-chooser-button.c          |  131 +--
 thunar/thunar-chooser-dialog.c          |  232 +++---
 thunar/thunar-chooser-model.c           |  450 +++-------
 thunar/thunar-chooser-model.h           |   23 +-
 thunar/thunar-clipboard-manager.c       |   53 +-
 thunar/thunar-clipboard-manager.h       |    3 +-
 thunar/thunar-create-dialog.c           |  155 ++--
 thunar/thunar-create-dialog.h           |   25 +-
 thunar/thunar-dbus-service.c            |   47 +-
 thunar/thunar-debug.c                   |    4 -
 thunar/thunar-deep-count-job.c          |  373 ++++++++
 thunar/thunar-deep-count-job.h          |   48 +
 thunar/thunar-details-view.c            |   20 -
 thunar/thunar-dialogs.c                 |  100 ++-
 thunar/thunar-dialogs.h                 |   42 +-
 thunar/thunar-dnd.c                     |   21 +-
 thunar/thunar-enum-types.c              |   57 ++
 thunar/thunar-enum-types.h              |   56 ++
 thunar/thunar-file.c                    | 1455 +++++++++++++++++++++++--------
 thunar/thunar-file.h                    |  309 ++-----
 thunar/thunar-folder.c                  |  192 +++--
 thunar/thunar-gio-extensions.c          |  355 ++++++++
 thunar/thunar-gio-extensions.h          |   63 ++
 thunar/thunar-gtk-extensions.c          |    4 -
 thunar/thunar-icon-factory.c            |   13 +-
 thunar/thunar-io-jobs-util.c            |  139 +++
 thunar/thunar-io-jobs-util.h            |   36 +
 thunar/thunar-io-jobs.c                 | 1074 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 thunar/thunar-io-jobs.h                 |   54 ++
 thunar/thunar-io-scan-directory.c       |  123 +++
 thunar/thunar-io-scan-directory.h       |   37 +
 thunar/thunar-job.c                     | 1001 +++++++++++++++++++++
 thunar/thunar-job.h                     |  112 +++
 thunar/thunar-launcher.c                |  521 +++++++-----
 thunar/thunar-list-model.c              |  155 ++--
 thunar/thunar-location-button.c         |   29 +-
 thunar/thunar-location-buttons.c        |   31 +-
 thunar/thunar-location-entry.c          |  151 +++-
 thunar/thunar-marshal.list              |    4 +
 thunar/thunar-metafile.c                |   42 +-
 thunar/thunar-metafile.h                |    5 +-
 thunar/thunar-path-entry.c              |   65 +-
 thunar/thunar-permissions-chooser.c     |  263 +++---
 thunar/thunar-preferences-dialog.c      |  103 +--
 thunar/thunar-preferences.c             |   71 +-
 thunar/thunar-progress-dialog.c         |  152 ++--
 thunar/thunar-progress-dialog.h         |    7 +-
 thunar/thunar-properties-dialog.c       |  108 ++--
 thunar/thunar-renamer-dialog.c          |   20 +-
 thunar/thunar-renamer-model.c           |   11 +-
 thunar/thunar-sendto-model.c            |  196 ++---
 thunar/thunar-shortcuts-icon-renderer.c |   45 +-
 thunar/thunar-shortcuts-model.c         |  433 +++++-----
 thunar/thunar-shortcuts-view.c          |  594 +++++++++----
 thunar/thunar-simple-job.c              |  223 +++++
 thunar/thunar-simple-job.h              |   64 ++
 thunar/thunar-size-label.c              |   81 +-
 thunar/thunar-standard-view.c           |  212 +++---
 thunar/thunar-templates-action.c        |    7 +-
 thunar/thunar-text-renderer.c           |   19 -
 thunar/thunar-transfer-job.c            |  888 +++++++++++++++++++
 thunar/thunar-transfer-job.h            |   60 ++
 thunar/thunar-trash-action.c            |    9 +-
 thunar/thunar-tree-model.c              |  280 ++++---
 thunar/thunar-tree-view.c               |  730 ++++++++++------
 thunar/thunar-user.c                    |  833 ++++++++++++++++++
 thunar/thunar-user.h                    |   88 ++
 thunar/thunar-util.c                    |  105 ++-
 thunar/thunar-util.h                    |   16 +-
 thunar/thunar-window.c                  |  274 +++---
 75 files changed, 10491 insertions(+), 3947 deletions(-)

The overall size of the patch is 844kb already.

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Friday, April 24 2009

Thunar/GIO - Quick Status Report

By Jannis Pohlmann on Friday, April 24 2009, 01:27

I've started hacking on the migration of Thunar to GIO on April 9th. In about 61 commits, I've reduced the original number of ThunarVFS references in the Thunar source code dramatically. The most important and probably most time-consuming part of this work is only mentioned briefly on those pages: rewriting all recursive copy/move/trash/restore/chmod/chgrp/chown jobs -- by now most of the jobs have been rewritten based on GIO and the new ThunarJob framework ... and Thunar still works (for me at least)!

All in all, I suppose that about a third of the implementation work is done. Ok, maybe just a quarter, but an important one. I now have a very good overview over the source code and I'm almost done with one of the most critical parts of the migration.

If you want to know how that looks like for me, here's a screenshot:

These are the most important/big things that are still waiting for me:

Replace ThunarVFSVolumeManager with GFileMonitor. Volume management is a large and complex subsystem of both ThunarVFS and GIO.
Load ThunarFile objects asynchronously. This will be a pain. A lot of functions will have to be split up to fit into the asynchronous concept.
Move the thumbnail related code into exo

These two are a bit out of scope but very important nonetheless:

Integrate functionality similar to Gigolo (remote/virtual places management) into the file manager.
Write GNOME-independent GIO extensions for volume management and the trash.

On a side node: Xubuntu 9.04 is available as of today! Go and grab it if you're interested in a nice distro based on Xfce. If you're interested in the Xubuntu development, you'll be able to meet Stephan, several Xubuntu folks and me at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona from May 25th-29th. I'm very excited already!

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