19 Jun 2005: RC3 is out

RC3 looks good, I'm actually quite happy with it. Oh, and since I won our little 100,000'th bug pool (yay), I should give my thanks to all the monkeys. Thanks!

Probably one of the stranger changes for RC3 was the removal of the "Run As SWT Application" action. For more, I think it's worth pointing at this post by Veronika which explains the removal.

While playing with RC3, I finally took the time to write a screen magnifier to take over from xzoom, which has served me well but was missing a few too many features.

11 Jun 2005: Using valgrind with gcj 4.0

I wanted to use valgrind to check for leaks in the SWT code, and I thought using gcj might make it easier. Also, now that gcj-4.0 is in Debian unstable, things are a lot better.

However, there are apparently some problems with valgrind and boehm-gc, the GC used by gcj. Luckily, I found that it is not too hard to get valgrind to suppress the false errors from the gcj code.

Here is the suppression list I wrote to tell valgrind to shut up.

valgrind has proved useful, I have already found one potential leak!

1 Jun 2005: Goodbye flash

Eclipse 3.1RC2 will look awesome if you're using GTK+ 2.6.

Some changes to GTK+ for version 2.6 do a really crazy X hack to make menus look better. This hack also helps editor switching closing in Eclipse. Yesterday, I discovered that a very small change in SWT lets the same hack work for Control.setRedraw(), which now works without any flash of the widget's background colour.

The change makes eclipse look awesome in lots of random cases. Toolbars that flashed during tab switching all look great, and the Help view looks a lot better. Of course, this doesn't excuse gratuitous uses of setRedraw(). We should still make sure it is used only when necessary.

29 May 2005: Cleaning bugs

I've been trying to go through my bugs and make sure nothing gets missed for 3.1. I think we're looking pretty good: RC1 seems to be working well (better than M7 anyway).

On IRC the reports were that Andrew and Ben's talk on Eclipse at GUADEC went well. Yay!

21 May 2005: RC1 approaches...

I'm up to 11 bugs fixed for RC1 now, but quickly running out of time. The trick is to squeeze in fixes for bugs which I really want to make 3.1, but aren't terribly critical, since you know that you're just going to have to fix the really bad ones later anyway regardless :)

Most interesting, I finally figured out why the mouse wheel wasn't working in the compare editor under GTK+ and got that fixed. Leetness...

3 Apr 2005: M6

Now that M6 is out the door, I have enough free time to start my eclipse blog!
Copyright © 2005 Billy Biggs - vektor@dumbterm.net