COSI

One of my greatest achievements in Clarkson University is becoming a student-director of Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI). This page is intended to help me and our academic adviser be on the same page about the events and meetings in the club. Here is what I have done this semester.
GNOME
October 2006
I have taken up a project to improve and debug Gnome. I am building Gnome from CVS using Jhbuild on testing-ground.sclab.clarkson.edu, which used to be itl-lab-15.sclab.clarkson.edu. Debugging is done ad-hoc while using the system. There is a bunch of useful information on Gnome Wiki. I am using information on this page for an introduction to performance improvement, and collecting random bits and pieces of useful information from Gnome performance mailing list. Bounties are also a possibility.

First successful build. The horizon is now clear for writing patches. There were a few bumps on the ride to this milestone. For example, I had to disable builds of dbus-glib, evolution-exchange, and nautilus-vcs. Dbus-glib requires user interaction when applying a patch, which is impossible when building automatically. Evolution-exchange fails to find evolution libraries in the proper prefix, although evolution was also installed there from CVS. Finally, nautilus-vcs fails to install because of a mystery line "install_sh = @install_sh@" in its makefile. For some reason, that line never gets changed when the makefile is created from makefile.in.in. Configuring the packages also required some trickery. For example, I had to pass "--enable-system-cairo" to mozilla to make it compile without errors. See my jhbuild configuration for details on this and other customizations.

I found a crasher in libgnomekbd, wrote a patch, and it got accepted in a few hours! Go, Team-COSI! One interesting thing I practiced here is contacting developers directly after filing a bug. This is a skill I learned from Eli Dow, a COSI alumni and fund raiser. Bugzilla is highly important "paperwork", but developers don't seem to mind being poked once in a while about fixing serious problems in their source code. After all, their reputation in the open-source community lies in the code they write.

Nautilus
August 2006
I helped out with smoke-testing Gnome 2.16, and found a crasher in Nautilus. After learning the awesome power of gdb, I wrote a patch, which was accepted! I am subscribed to nautilus-devel mailing list, and keep up with current events.
December 2006 | Rouslan Solomakhin