[gcmd-dev] GCMD status update

[Uwe Scholz]

It has been a bit quiet here so I want to give you a status update of
how work on Gnome Commander is ongoing. The news cover three things: The
GCMD home page, bug #570733(*) and some other news.


GCMD home page
==============

When you visited gcmd.github.io in the last weeks you may already have
noticed the change on the main page: News are now listed as separate
articles with release date and a clickable link. The reason for this is
that I decided to use the tool "jekyll" for generating the HTML code for
new articles. Jekyll does this automatically by parsing single text
files which are placed in the folder "_posts" of the homepage's git
repository. Out of those files static HTML code is generated and
included in the page which is configured for this.

The nice thing about using Jekyll is that one can add invisible tags to
the head of each post, which in turn might make the design of the
homepage much more flexible in the future: Just imagine to write your
own short article about the work with GCMD which could be released in a
dedicated "User" section, having the post tagged with "user-article" or
something like that...


Bug #570733
===========

This bug was opened several years ago by André, and it is about the
deprecation of gnome-config(*). Currently I'm hard working on the
migration from gnome-config to GSettings (the post-successor of
gnome-config). This means, when the work is done, GCMD will store the
changes in the default settings in a binary file in ~/.config/dconf/user
which could be edited from inside GCMD as well as via external tools as
dconf-editor. This is currently the state-of-the-art of how to store
settings in Gnome.

Settings in the old config-files (in ~/.gnome2 and ~/.gnome-commander)
will be smoothly migrated into GSettings - you won't have to fear loss
of your old settings.

Although saving settings in a binary file might first sound awkward for
some of you, the very cool thing about this is that GSettings brings
many improvements compared to the old gnome-config. For example, it is
easy to reset single settings back to the default value when changed, or
one can easily read out settings of other programs which makes desktop
integration much easier.

The code for this change is currently located in the GSettings branch of
the gcmd git repository. Check it out if you want to have a look at it
or want to help somewhere! :) 

(*) https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570733


Miscellaneous
=============

A new color theme named "Winter" has been committed to GCMD by a
anonymous user some days ago. It will go into the next stable release.
See 
https://github.com/gcmd/gnome-commander/commit/52370e8b70a51d20eba66c0f567ce680b3ec8d8f


Best wishes
Uwe