Programming: LibreArts, rio, and GNOME

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 04, 2023

• LibreArts Weekly recap — 3 September 2023

  This is a comparatively short recap, because there haven’t been all that many changes and releases. Highlights: new features in Inkscape and FreeCAD, new releases of BlenderBIM and libwacom, cool new stuff in Ardour.

  The Swatches dock UI has been recently updated by Mike Kowalski.

• 10 years of rio

  rio was the first R package I uploaded to CRAN. And actually, I had my first experience with the back then not-so-friendly CRAN team. I was accused by a CRAN team member for wasting his time 1. But after many back-and-forth e-mails and uploads, the first version of rio, v0.1.1, was released on CRAN on 2013-08-28 at 14:02 CEST. That’s right: that was exactly ten years ago today.

  I used rio in my own PhD research for quickly save and load data. But I did not find rio to be widely used in 2013-2014. There was no development for almost a year (as there was no need, rio worked well enough for my research), until I received an e-mail from Dr Thomas J. Leeper (now research scientist at Facebook Meta) in 2015 saying he updated the package to support more formats (excel, json, etc.) and asking how should he proceed with contributing to the package. At the time, I was busy with my own PhD research (plus million other research projects and services). He even offered to me to uptake the maintainership of rio. I agreed and then the rest is history.

• Jonathan Blandford: Crosswords 0.3.11: Acrostic Panels

  Long time, no release.

  When I last blogged about GNOME Crosswords, I had a design plan to improve the editing API. It’s been a busy summer since then. The crosswords team rewrote large chunks of code to implement and use this new API: [...]

• Andy Holmes: Mentoring in Open Source

  This year, I was invited by Sonny Piers to be a co-mentor for the GNOME Foundation, working on platform demos for Workbench. I already contribute a lot of entry-level documentation and help a lot of contributors, so this felt like a good step in a direction I've been heading for a while.