LiveJournal has been really frustrating me recently spammers and with the lack of OpenID. I've moved my blog here.

I've had about a billion people to ask me to enable OpenID on my blog. The only way I can enable OpenID is to also allow anonymous postings (!!) and when I do that I get 50+ spam a day to sort through. I think it's LJ just being difficult.

Ideally I want to move away from LiveJournal as I have the free account that is getting more stupid every month and the spam problem is getting worse, even just allowing registered users.

Does anyone know how I apply for a blog at blogs.gnome.org? I've tried, but Sorry, that email address is not allowed so I'm guessing I need a @gnome.org email address.

Any other ideas?

I've finally solved all the issues with PackageKit and Debian - I present the new gnome-packagekit frontend for Debian:

Joking aside, Debian and Ubuntu can work just fine with PackageKit, I'm really not sure what all the noise is about.

Do you develop a GNOME program and want to install extra stuff for your application? Want me to write you some code for your application to make it "just work"?

Ideas I can think of:

• Installing extensions in epiphany
• Installing debuginfos in the GNOME crasher thing
• Installing language packs in abiword
• Installing clipart for scribus
• Installing -devel packages in anjuta for the autocompletion
• Making GIMP install it's own plugins when an obscure file format is opened

Any other suggestions welcome. Please email me if you want some help. You can install a package based on the package name, or just by specifying a file that the package provides. All the yucky stuff like licence agreements and GPG auth is handled in libpackagekit-gnome.

You'll need to be running Fedora 9 prerelease if you want precompiled rpm's that work. I'll make the code a configure option (--enable-packagekit) so it won't be a hard dep. Any takers?

Here's some stuff that now works properly:


Notice the new checkbox to cut the repo list down to a sane size?


Notice the new 'All packages' group?


Now we tell you if we add deps!

In other, more interesting news, there's now a new library on the street, libpackagekit-gnome.

This shared library will allow integration with GTK dialogs for the common prompts, gconf for licence preferences and hopefully gnome-keyring for the gpg auth stuff. It basically makes adding software in your GNOME application super trivial. More information and samples to come when I've got some gtk-doc documentation.

Richard.

In gpk-update-viewer, the user can select with checkboxes which updates should be applied. This is fine, until you want to uncheck or check them all at once, where for 300 updates, unclicking each box seems tiresome.

Matthias suggested a checkbox in the treeview header (but can't remember where he had seen that) and I quite like a right-click context menu. The open bug is here. Ideas welcome.

Thanks!

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there a more modern, GLib'ish version of gperf? I want to go from string->enum and emun->string faster than just using strcmp in a loop. I don't think I want to use GHashTable as it needs to be bi-directional. I like nice compact simple C code, and don't like awk in makefiles. Ideas?

Richard.

Today I've released into the wild pm-utils 1.1.0.

Please see the wiki page for more details about the release.

Most of the problems distros have had with pm-utils should be addressed in this release. We'll be doing far more frequent releases now, so expect another release sometime in the next month.

Thanks to all involved in this release.

Today I released PackageKit and gnome-packagekit 0.1.10.

PackageKit release notes.
gnome-packagekit release notes.

Tarballs available here.