Still rollin

March 21, 2010
Huh boy, I noticed the last post is old more than a month ago; the time is passing for me recently much faster than usually.

Probably the main reason for this is my new job, and some time I need to get used to new environment, people, workflow and the rest of the package that comes with it. As consequence, I had to shutdown (hopefully only temporarily) build farm, as build computers were hosted in facility owned my previous employee.

Other than that, I finally installed 64-bit Slackware 13, which I planned to do for some time. Maybe the main reason for this was to see how EDE will work on pure 64-bit platform; personally, 32-bit, 64-bit, they are all the same for me, except additional burden to learn assembler for different architecture (it is always good to know some asm when you do gdb beyond dumping simple backtrace).

Unexpectedly (duh!), I found problems in EDE code, both compiling and working. Compiling errors were mostly caused by newer gcc (due stdarg changes in glibc) and (as usually) PIC flag(s) for library creation.

Working errors were caused by some pointer magic (as expected) and my wrong assumption how WM property data is stored as CARD32 type. Other than this, I didn't find other 64bit specific issues, although this statement should be taken with some caution :)

Also, I added application icon support in ede-panel, as shown in the screenshot below.


This was (and still is) a quick hack and will be in some future stored in edelib, so the code can be used, for example, to show application icon in tooltip or pager.

Clock applet got some tiny refreshing with flat box and tooltip showing current date, like:


AFAIK this behavior is copied by others, so why EDE should be exception ;) Joke aside, this is pretty useful thing; for example I often forget current date and do not want to start ede-datetime just to check what day or weekday today is.