Today Robin and I released GNOME-Mud 0.10.5, which includes a number of minor but cool features. The annoying handling of connection tabs has been corrected, and tabs are now shown if there's more than one connection, as in Galeon, and the tabs have an icon that describes if the connection is active or not. The Python-GTK support for python plugins has been finally fixed and a useful python plugin (health monitor) has been included in the distribution. A few old and annoying bugs have also been killed, like being now able to use GNOME-Mud in non-UTF-8 muds properly (but this needs a proper solution still).The most noticeable change in this release is that we finally, after 6 years, have our own application icon (gnome-mud had been stealing the gnome-gmush icon that gets distributed with GNOME for ages). The icon is simple and neat, courtesy of Daniel Taylor, who recently contributed icons for gossip and Blam!. He's now writing an Inkscape tutorial, which I really hope will help me to get a clue on icon drawing.

I sponsored a few packages in the last few days: daf's ruby-gnome2 and mozilla-locale-cy packages, and ajmich's treecc, a pre-dependency for his nearly ready to upload Portable.NET packages, which are waiting for a fix for the weird shared libs handling (or just accept it as is and go with the weird dependencies that would carry, I'm getting Andrew to see how the Mono packagers dealt with this).

Finally, made new ispellcat packages to transition to the new debconf .config scripts (Agustín is doing an excellent job with dictionaries-common) and fixed gnome-common's build deps... oops. I knew adding automake1.4 to gnome-common's requirements would quickly get me some bug in the BTS, but the sad reality is that many GNOME modules still don't build with anything newer. You probably want to set REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.6 in your autogen.sh script if you want to use something else. For now, at least. Malcolm has a plan to aggressively migrate all the GNOME stuff to something newish, so this shouldn't be a problem in a few months.

Orkut status: mostly forgotten now. Enjoy my personal data, Google.