In praise of Shotwell

[Mikko]

I recently set up a F13 system for my parents, who have been retired for some time and have not used computers at all since their retirement. They had forgotten a shocking amount of stuff (gone from using email to barely being able to find keys on the keyboard). I was dreading a little the handling of photos from their camera and phones, but Shotwell's user interface actually proved to be very easy for them to grasp. Gthumb or any of the other ones would have been a lot harder.

I took a closer look at Shotwell myself and built the new 0.6 version from source. I'd heard about Vala before, but only now realized just what it is. I think it's a great idea to use the C runtime and introduce just a relatively simple compiler and bindings instead of a new VM and an entire runtime. The performance seems to be very snappy (I'm saying this a someone who's been pretty underwhelmed by Mono apps).

I just hope Shotwell 0.6.1 is packaged for F13 soon. There are quite a lot of useful new features.

[Hlingler]

You could download the F13 shotwell-0.5.2 SRPM and rebuild for F13 using the new 0.6.1 source code (and a few spec-file edits) - it looks like there are no patches to deal with: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/b...buildID=173112

Or file a bug report against shotwell to request an update: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/

V

[Mikko]

I have the latest version for myself, that's not the problem. I assumed that since Shotwell was made the default and since 0.6 is a significant improvement, it would get updated in Fedora 13 without me prodding anyone.

[Hlingler]

I would not make that assumption.

V

[Mikko]

Originally Posted by Hlingler

I would not make that assumption.

The package seems to be on its way. Shotwell 0.6.1 requires libgexiv2 0.1.0 and LibRaw 0.9.1. libgexiv2 is already in Koji. The version is too old, but it's a simple update (replace tarball). LibRaw is not in Fedora yet, but the package review seems to be nearly done:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=602279

This is apparently being done specifically to be able to package Shotwell 0.6.1, so it looks like its being done. Building Shotwell itself is also a simple update of the tarball and editing of the dependencies.

[Mikko]

Shotwell 0.6.1 is now in Koji. Thanks to Siddhesh Poyarekar for packaging LibRaw and for Matthias Clasen for packaging Shotwell. See

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/b...buildID=183318