February 2009 News

Maybe it's because February is so short or, more likely, because we started a lot of things in January, but not that many exciting things have happened in wx land during this month. To continue from the last month summary, we did move closer to finalizing the new event handling code, although we had to introduce a new Bind() method (which I'm going to describe in another post soon) as trying to introduce new features while keeping backwards compatibility with the existing code using Connect() proved to be too hard. And the wxYield-related changes were mostly finished too.

Unfortunately not much has been done for the remaining big item for 2.9.0 release: unification of the debug and release builds. This is something which would be really useful for both the library users and developers and actually doing it will probably be not that difficult -- but deciding what exactly should be done proves to be more agonizing than expected. I still hope to do it in March but then I said the same thing about February at the end of January, of course...

There were also some discussions about releases: both 2.8.10 and 2.9.0. Please help us with testing them if you can!

The only new features of note implemented in this month were, AFAICS, the new wxTaskBarIcon implementation for wxGTK by Paul which should look much better in modern desktop environments and support for hints (a.k.a. cue banners or placeholder strings) to wxTextEntry (and hence wxTextCtrl and wxComboBox).

As usual, several bugs were fixed. The most important one was arguably #626 which is a problem with wxTreeCtrl selection events in wxTR_MULTIPLE mode. As can be seen from its number, it was a very long-standing ticket and while the fix hasn't been checked in just yet, it's going to be done very soon -- thanks a lot to Jonathan Liu who spent a lot of time working on this (and several other bugs as well).

Finally, some statistics for February: there were 632 commits in the repository, 67 new tickets were created, 84 were modified and 61 were closed. We'll try to do better in the next month (and preferably not by making Trac crash with internal server error and thus making it impossible for people to enter new tickets... I do love Trac UI and workflow but it's still amazing that it's the only ticketing system which I ever saw crashing -- but then I saw it do this all the time).

That's all for this month folks and have a nice March!