Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 12:49 am by Don

It hasn’t been too productive of a month for me with my GRAMPS work. I spent two of the past four weeks on vacation. I spent a week in Alaska, and a week visiting my parents.

Alaska is an amazing place. If you haven’t been there yet, make sure you get it down on your list of places to visit. I live in Colorado, and we have some amazing scenery, but Alaska wins hands down. I’ve been transfering some VHS video taken during the Alaska trip to DVD, which has been an interesting experience. I’m not sure that I am doing it in an optimal way, but I may write an article on what I did. Kino is nice tool.

Alex got the 2.0.5 release out the door, so hopefully we will have fewer bugs creep up on us. I have resumed my work on the Narrative Web Page generator. This concept is from Steve Hall, and is nicer version of our web page generator. While we’ve dropped the web site templating features, the new CSS approach produces very nice looking pages – and more complete pages. I hope to get this included in 2.0.6.

Another feature we slipped in recent releases was the Checkpoint tool. This tool will grab a current snapshot of the database and check it into RCS for revision control. Ideally, I’d like to find someone who wants to expand this, adding support for other revision control systems and support for retrieving data from the revision control system. It shouldn’t be too hard to do this, but I’m spreading myself too thin on projects like this. I need to be spending more time on the Report Generation improvements and on the 2.1/2.2 enhancements. If you want to help, let me know.

I participated in an odd exchange on the LINUX-GEN mailing list. Several people were complaining about some installation problems with GRAMPS. While it isn’t surprising that GRAMPS can be difficult to install on some distributions (especially those that don’t support GNOME), it struck me as odd that people would go to a non-GRAMPS mailing list to complain about installation problems instead of going to the GRAMPS project and asking for help. We have mailing lists, websites, bug tracking support and just about any other way imaginable to help people. And as a project, we have a pretty good reputation for going out of our way to help people.

I tried to explain to the list that if you have car problems it is more effective to call a mechanic and explain the problem than it is to stand in your driveway and shout, “My car won’t start!” But, I don’t think I was understood.