Updated E17 packages

Now that I'm on my brand new cable connection, I can upload packages with 1Mbit/s - a vast improvement which allows me to keep the E17 Debian repository up to date more frequently than during the last four months.
The new packages include the E17 NetworkManager client (exalt) and its control module (emodule-exalt). Thanks to exchange the E17 user can now download and install themes right from the desktop shell.

At this point I'd like to thank Daniel (aka Quaker) for updating and adding Debian files in the E17 svn tree.

New E17 packages

After many weeks I finally updated the i386 and amd64 packages in the E17 Debian repository. The reason behind the delay is first and foremost my slow internet connection on which it took more than 15 hours (at 6Kb/s) to upload the new deb's. With that in mind I made sure that the new packages work prior to uploading them in order to avoid the pain of uploading fixes.

Nonetheless, due to many changes to the E17 source code since the last update, some issues were brought to my attention most of which are caused by outdated configuration directories. The previous packages are too old and its settings are not compatible. Even though purging the config dir is usually not strictly necessary, I recommend it for future updates if errors occur. Furthermore it might be necessary to remove old packages from this repository before installing the new ones because some libraries (i.e. evas) were reduced to less packages.

In general, I recommend the following upgrade procedure:

1. Backup your configuration directory (~/.e).
2. Upgrade to new packages.
3. Check if the configuration works with the new packages. If yes, skip to 13.
4. Remove the (previously backed-up) configuration directory.
5. Check if E17 works. If yes, skip to 13.
6. Remove all packages from this repository.
7. Run 'apt-get clean' or equivalent.
   
8. Reinstall E17 (i.e. by running 'apt-get install e17').
9. Check if E17 works. If yes, skip to 13.
10. Please make sure to set up pinning as described in the wiki.
11. Check if E17 works. If yes, skip to 13.
    
12. Please contact me.
13. Done.

Any feedback is welcome.

KDE 4.2

I'm usually changing desktop environments on a weekly to monthly basis, depending on their releases. On Gentoo that's a hell lot of fun and could take several hours whereas in Ubuntu it's done in a couple of minutes.
For me the three most usable and interesting desktop environments are KDE, Gnome and - of course - Enlightenment. There are other alternatives, most notably XFCE which offers it's own set of utilities, like file manager, widget set, etc. but I haven't used it intensely in years mostly because it's Qt-based, like KDE GTK-based, like Gnome, and thus isn't as interesting for me.
While Gnome looks most archaic in my opinion but is very well integrated in Ubuntu, KDE is slightly slower but offers a solid framework and a nice default theme. Enlightenment on the other hand offers by far the fasted window manager as well as its own set of graphic and system libraries. I won't go into details regarding Enlightenment, I already wrote enough about it; needless to say, it's my favourite.
Well, back to the main topic. Just a couple of hours after the official release of KDE 4.2 the Kubuntu team already offers updated packages in their experimental PPA repository (a speed which, by the way, reminds me a lot to Gentoo). Unsatisfied as I was about KDE 4.0 and 4.1, I gave it a shot, despite its 'experimental' tag. To my surprise it's a real joy and a huge step towards what I expected of the 4-series of KDE. Until now KDE 4 seemed to be slow and incomplete compared to KDE 3.5, with many feateres missing, such as custom key bindings which I so frequently use to start my most used applications. KDE 4.2 remedied this situation, ships with a brand new theme, a bunch of new desktop widgets (plasmoids), is much faster and I yet have to discover any bugs, not to mention all the bugs and glitches that have disappeared.
I hope the next revision will be as ground breaking.

create packages of E17 themes

Before the repository revamp there were packages for E17 themes in the repository on debian.alphagemini.org; they were based on a BASH script which fetched the themes listed on get-e.org. Now that get-e.org is gone, E17 themes can be found on exchange.enlightenment.org along with a whole lot of desktop wallpapers, 3rd party applications and modules. That's why I felt it was time for writing a new script, this time in python. It basically does the same, with less BASHish temp files, sed, grep or wget usage. To use it, simply run it in an empty directory as a normal user (no privileges are required) and run dpkg-buildpackage in the resulting folder. It can be downloaded here.

I've uploaded the packages to my repository, including the virtual package e17-themes which installs all available themes.

Currently included themes:

e17-theme-apple-17 - The Apple 17 theme for E17
e17-theme-baroque - The Baroque theme for E17
e17-theme-black-chrome - The Black Chrome theme for E17
e17-theme-blingbling - The BlingBling theme for E17
e17-theme-bloody-imago - The Bloody Imago theme for E17
e17-theme-blue-eyed-theme - The Blue Eyed Theme theme for E17
e17-theme-camou - The Camou theme for E17
e17-theme-cerium - The Cerium theme for E17
e17-theme-chrome - The Chrome theme for E17
e17-theme-clearlooks - The Clearlooks theme for E17
e17-theme-crema - The Crema theme for E17
e17-theme-crude - The Crude theme for E17
e17-theme-cthulhain - The Cthulhain theme for E17
e17-theme-dali - The Dali theme for E17
e17-theme-darkness - The Darkness theme for E17
e17-theme-darkrevolution - The Darkrevolution theme for E17
e17-theme-darkside - The Darkside theme for E17
e17-theme-dukes - The Dukes theme for E17
e17-theme-edjy - The Edjy theme for E17
e17-theme-fireball - The Fireball theme for E17
e17-theme-gant - The Gant theme for E17
e17-theme-grunge - The Grunge theme for E17
e17-theme-iceball - The Iceball theme for E17
e17-theme-imago - The Imago theme for E17
e17-theme-japan2007 - The Japan2007 theme for E17
e17-theme-kor - The Kor theme for E17
e17-theme-night-bling - The Night Bling theme for E17
e17-theme-nyz - The nyz theme for E17
e17-theme-pinkapple - The PinkApple theme for E17
e17-theme-purewm - The PureWM theme for E17
e17-theme-siro - The Siro theme for E17
e17-theme-smoke - The Smoke theme for E17
e17-theme-steampunk - The Steampunk theme for E17
e17-theme-winter - The Winter theme for E17
e17-theme-xliquid - The XLiquid theme for E17

E17 migrates to subversion

After the E17 team has been busy converting the version control system from CVS to subversion I saw the need to update my build script to reflect this migration and finally adress a heap of bugs which have been around since the last version got released.
Along with various bugfixes, I've added functionality which further minimizes manual work needed to make packages compile. First of all, since configure.in files in subversion no longer generate Debian/changelog I've added a function which does just that: injecting the line necessary if needed. Furthermore there's now an option which generates a Debian/changelog file based on an adjustable amount of SVN log entries. The first two entries in the changelog.in of the emodules package might look like this:

emodules (@VERSION@-0cvs20080921) unstable; urgency=low

[ mekius ]
Fix history, thanks Sachiel :D

-- Falko Schmidt Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:06:54 +0000

emodules (@VERSION@-0cvs20080921) unstable; urgency=low

[ kaethorn ]
remove the echo module.

-- Falko Schmidt Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:46:58 +0000

Last but not least any source package which doesn't contain a Debian directory will automatically be ignored and thus not cause a build failure anymore. Packages either marked as not containing such a directory ("no debian dir") or which are mentioned in the DONTBUILDLIST variable ("skipped") will be marked accordingly in the "Check trunk" summary:



I've updated i386 and amd64 packages successfully and will from now on focus on updating and adding package descriptions in SVN. Downloads and installation instructions can be found here.

E17 sparc packages

I've compiled some sparc E17/EFL packages on a Sun Blade 1000 and uploaded them to the Debian repository. That means there are packages available for all those who need a fast desktop environment even on some of Sun Microsystem's older, but still very reliable workstations.

Usual installation procedures apply here as well.

E17 amd64 packages

Just an update to the previous post:

A new set of amd64 packages has been uploaded and should provide the same functionality as their i386 counterparts. Packages for alpha are planned for the following weeks, probably Sparc packages as well.

Big Debian E17 overhaul

As the PkgE Team is working hard to get E17 into Debian/experimental, I took some time to merge most of their packaging goodness into the debian/ folders of the enlightenment CVS tree. As a result the repository at debian.alphagemini.org now features higher consistency regarding package names and dependencies.
The major change involved renaming of -dev, -dbg and -bin packages of all libraries which now look like libfoo-dev instead of libfoo0-dev. The second change was the package name of enlightenment itself which is now available as e17. Furthermore libe-dbus is now called libedbus. libeet1 is now available from the official Debian repositories as well and should be compatible with the rest of the packages.
Due to all these changes installations will most probably break upon upgrade which can be prevented by uninstalling all previous packages from this repository beforehand. Afterwards a regular

apt-get install e17 emodules-all

should do the rest.

Apart from the above changes there are also some additions, namely three new emodules (execwatch, iiirk and notification) as well as the edje editor.

The AMD64 port will be updated accordingly as soon as the i386 port works flawlessly.

Thanks a lot to Guillaume, Sedat and Vit for reporting bugs and suggestions, and of course to the PkgE-Team for providing the package descriptions.

Further information and instructions can be found here.