Jannis Pohlmann

Jannis

I am an open source enthusiast, student and musician from Lübeck, Germany. In my free time I enjoy hacking on Xfce and Lunar Linux. I've been a member of both teams since about 2005. Besides developing software, I love to listen to and play music (Guitar, Bass and Drums) and hang out with friends.

Contact me via jannis@xfce.org. My public PGP key is 0x354AFBA6. You can download it from here.

My CV is also available for download.

Navigation

Tuesday, June 16 2009

Preview: Browsing SFTP with Thunar

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:

Friday, June 5 2009

News Update

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.

Sunday, May 24 2009

Trip to Barcelona

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be travelling to Barcelona, where I'm going to spend the week surrounded by hackers from all over the world planning the next release of Ubuntu. I'll meet up with Stephan, Cody, Michael and Steve there to improve Xubuntu but I'll hopefully also run into a few other familiar faces.

During the week I'll do my best in setting up the new Xfce documentation repository based on the discussions we had over the last few weeks. I'll also try to cook up Lunar Linux modules for Transifex so that we'll have it up and running as soon as we switch our repositories over to Git. These are my goals - let's see how far I can get.

I'm hoping for a few very nice couple of days. I've never been south of Germany and it's my first time in Spain ever. As a fortunate coincidence, there's the Champions League final Barcelona vs. Manchester United on Wednesday. Not that I'm much of football fan ... but I like it when people go crazy.

Tuesday, May 5 2009

Twitter

I'm on Twitter now. My username is jannispohlmann. I guess I'll be microblogging about software (Xfce!) mostly and post the personal stuff on Facebook were only my friends can read it (hopefully). Follow me if you're interested.

Edit: Ok, I'm also on identi.ca now: identi.ca profile. I'll be forwarding anything from ident.ca to twitter, so you can follow me wherever you want.

Friday, May 1 2009

Another Thunar/GIO Status Update

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.