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.

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Tuesday, November 25 2008

December plans and recent Xfce developments

By Jannis Pohlmann on Tuesday, November 25 2008, 23:51

I’m currently planning the last few things for my trip to the UDS Jaunty, taking place in Mountain View, California from December 8th to 12th. It looks like Brian will pick me up at San Francisco International on the day of my arrival. We’ll probably have something to eat before he drops me off at the hotel. What could possibly be more awesome than that? I’m very excited to say at least. I’ve also received my hotel reservation already and it looks like I’ll have a twin room on my own for half of my stay.

Ok, back to some Xfce related topics. Last week I submitted our FOSDEM devroom request. We’ll be notified before 2008-11-30 whether we the request is accepted or not. Five days left until we’ll know more - keep your fingers crossed if you haven’t already!

Nick and I have recently started to fix bugs in Thunar. So far we’ve managed to fix and close about a dozen bugs I think. We’re forced to do this due to Benny’s absence but I have to say it’s actually quite a lot of fun to fix bugs in other people’s code! In the end we’ll both have better understanding of how Thunar works. This will soon give us the possibility to push things forward. Not only am I planning to replace thunar-vfs with GIO/GVfs after 1.0 is released along with Xfce 4.6; there are more things that need to be done: adding support for xfconf might be worth considering as Thunar is now one of the last components that still stores its configuration using XfceRc. Also, we could think about using libxfce4menu for detecting installed applications which was actually one of the most important use cases of it that we had in mind before I started writing that library. And of course the list of possible features and cleanups doesn’t end here …

I also have some bad news. It looks like we’re having a bit of a problem with our 4.6 release schedule again. Due to the delay of the second beta, we were forced to delay the third beta as well. Maybe we can sort of fix that by leaving out the third release candidate but we still have to discuss how to handle this.

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Friday, November 7 2008

Second beta, German translations, FOSDEM

By Jannis Pohlmann on Friday, November 7 2008, 00:48

Just in case some of you are wondering already - yes, we’re late with releasing the second beta of Xfce 4.6 by a few days. It’ll probably be released this weekend, so we won’t fall behind the schedule too much.

On Wednesday we had a very productive IRC meeting with the most active German translators being present. Plans we made on that evening include to clean up the team’s wiki page so that it only contains rules and hints that are directly useful for everyone. We also decided that we need a better communication channel than private mails or the Xfce i18n mailinglist, so we’re probably going to have a mailinglist focused on German translations. Other teams might have the same need, so we’d like to do it public and encourage other teams to do the same, maybe officially hosted on foo-projects.org.
Another idea was to take a look at some of the distributions shipping Xfce. Do they have a translation system on their own? Are there potential translators among the users/developers of these distributions? How can we motivate more people to take part in the translation process so that everyone is happy with the result?
We’ve decided to have another German team meeting next Wednesday at 21:00 CET (20:00 UTC). Feel free to join if you’re interested and your German is good.

Today, we had a little discussion about the upcoming FOSDEM in February 2009. Several of us have expressed an interest to go there. With 4.6 out of the door and 4.8 ahead February is a pretty interesting date for Xfce as a project. I’m sure we could come up with several nice presentations and discussions about the future if we were to apply for a developer room. Xfce has been part of FOSDEM in 2005 already but since then a lot of things have changed and many new developers have joined the project, so it would be a great opportunity to finally meet everybody and have a few pints together.
We haven’t decided on whether Xfce is going to apply yet as we’re planning to get the second beta released before. Deadline for developer room applications is 11/22, so we still have some time. Even better, the deadline for the schedule itself is three weeks before the actual event. Enough time to prepare some decent speeches.

I’m pretty excited about all this. There’s a quite a lot of movement in the Xfce community at the moment (and also, related to this movement, a lot of exciting things are happening for me, with UDS and all that). I feel that things are improving constantly in terms of development as well as organization and communication. Now all we need is a proper goal - and FOSDEM might be exactly what we need to discuss things like that.

2AM, time for bed. Have a nice day (or night).

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Monday, October 13 2008

Beta release and personal news

By Jannis Pohlmann on Monday, October 13 2008, 22:30

For those of you who are eager to test the first Xfce 4.6 beta: We're running a bit late again. At least the delay won't be that big this time. Most packages are prepared already and the release will be rolled out tomorrow or the day after that I suppose. To be able to do this we had to add several feature freeze exceptions. If you keep in mind however that we stil have the option to sacrifice the second release candidate to keep up with the schedule, the final release date is not in danger yet.

There are also some news related to my person. Last week I received the official sponsorship invitation to the Ubuntu Developers Summit for Jaunty. So if things go well, I'll be able to be in Mountain View in December to represent Xfce when the Xubuntu team prepares their next release after Intrepid! This is very exciting and quite a big thing for me. So far I never made it across the pond and I'm not really happy about having to fly 11 hours or more to get there. But then again you just have to take the chances you get otherwise you'll not receive them anymore at some point. I've already turned down the attempts of Google to get me into their internship program last year which was quite frankly stupid. Anyway, I decided to forget about my fear of flying for once and take this great opportunity I'm offered by Canonical. I still need to sort out a few things, get a new passport and prepare for the event itself but I'm quite happy I made this decision.

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