Seed on Mac OS X

2010.01.02 in code and gnome

New Year

First things first, happy new years! I'd say 2009 was one of the better years, personally (the world on a whole might have something to say about this), but I'm shooting for even more fun during this orbit.

My Gnome Stuff

I'm home from school until almost the end of January, and all of the holidays are over now, so I have a great deal of time opening up to work on various things that I've promised everyone. I apologize for disappearing, but school got particularly time-consuming last semester (and the time I spent on it resulted in my best semester yet!) — and that comes first.

Seed on OS X

Over the past few days, I've been getting Seed working on Mac OS X, in order to (try) to decrease the number of brain context switches required when I want to work on something quickly (I spend 99% of my time in OS X).

I've now got MacPorts packages for gobject-introspection, gir-repository, gnome-js-common, and seed, as well as modified packages for webkit-gtk (to fix a bug in the current packaging), clutter/clutter-gtk (to enable introspection support), and gnome-common (to pull in gnome-autogen.sh from 2.28, which works with the version of automake/autoconf that currently ships with MacPorts).

As far as I know, these packages only work against the very latest version of MacPorts (1.8.1), with the very latest packages on an install of Snow Leopard with 64-bit-userland (I suppose the number of people with 32-bit-Snow-Leopard is rather low). I've tested it from a totally fresh MacPorts install twice now, and it seems to work fine.

It's relatively easy to install, with one caveat: I don't have a machine which is both online most of the time and I have the ability to run rsyncd on, so you'll have to manually pull changes (I'll explain how in a moment).

To install:

Check out my custom ports tree:

cd /opt
sudo mkdir hortont-ports
sudo chown [your username] hortont-ports
git clone http://www.hortont.com/hortont-ports.git

Edit the file
```
/opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf
```
with administrator privileges, and add the line:
```
file:///opt/hortont-ports
```
before the line (at the bottom of the file) that reads:
```
rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/ports/ [default]
```
Upgrade your currently installed ports (important!), then install seed:
```
sudo port sync
sudo port upgrade outdated
sudo port install seed
```

To update:

Update your checkout of my ports tree:
```
cd /opt/hortont-ports
git pull
```

Update your installed ports:

sudo port sync
sudo port upgrade outdated

To use Seed, make sure that you set LD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly
(this all also assumes that /opt/local/bin is in your PATH):

```
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib
```
```
seed
```

Gnome Games

One of the primary things I'm planning on working on over the next few weeks is getting the three games from the summer up to tip-top shape for 2.30. Lights Off and Same (now swell-foop) are shipping, but they need documentation, high-scores, and (especially in the case of Same) performance help.

Epiphany Extensions

I've just gotten word that Epiphany JavaScript extensions are working much better now, as of the most recent (today) release of Seed. The last time I promised to look at various extensions for people, stability was a problem to the extent that I gave up after about ten minutes. So, this is another target for the next few weeks. Port some extensions, write some documentation, post the one extension that we have that works well somewhere better than bugzilla, etc.

All in all... should be a fun few weeks vacation!