Post-FOSDEM 2009

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too!

I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze.

A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC. Debian’s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want.

Elisa 0.5.27

So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable.

Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I’m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

Paul's Web Pages

Post-FOSDEM 2009

Elisa 0.5.27