Irssi for MSYS

Previously I tried to port finch which failed and have been looking at centerim too which nowhere easier. Now I'm back to focus on just the IRC part and let pidgin do YM task, the choice is clear: Irssi it also the most promising one to port than the two before. Irssi however is dull without perl just like all irc client supposed to be but adding perl would be too big, too many files.

I decide go with Msys setup which should be straightforward and it is, except how the plugins works. There is no libirrsi.dll or such thing so how it could load dll? note that the plugins isn't loadable module, it does depends/linked to Irssi (which has to be irssi.exe itself in windows unless it linked to irssi wholly). I learned about C Perl embedding too from this which involved joining dynaloader.o file in final linking.

irssi + twirssi in action

As you can see with perl, Irssi could be used as twitter client too although the popular way is using bitlbee gateway, unfortunately bitlbee is not work well with windows and the port is unmaintained. Msys version of Irssi has its quirks too, the obvious one is due to msys' limitation jabber plugin unlikely work but most important ones such as OTR and SILC may work. Because of limited nix functionality I'm stuck with DateTime::TimeZone perl module, which assume Msys as unix rather than Win32 for this particular issue, where perl should look up windows' registry to find local timezone thus modifying local.pm needed by aliasing 'msys' as 'Win32'. Also msys file permission is not entirely nix style which lead unexpected behavior.

BTW installing twirssi on vanilla msys-perl can be troublesome, there are dozens of modules from CPAN will be installed/updated which in the end still not completely satisfy its dependencies. Careful

irssi-0.8.15_msys.7z

A Peek at MyPaint on Windows...

Not exactly what I want to write, but I have skipped the whole month now. Last weekend I tried latest mypaint and things are out of my reach. I couldn't build it normally at all and quite lost in the scons scripts but nonetheless I managed to made it. Still http://gna.org/bugs/?19948 (I'd personally call this release blocker for Windows) is here to stay. I try read the commits which trigger this windows specific bug but it seems to be a part of larger internal changes in mypaint.

So guys it would be nice if someone step up and fix this annoying bug, your help is greatly appreciated!

mypaint

Sorry about the lame void in the shot (gosh that's XP still living?), I have made some nice technical sketches but when I hit F10 (resize to fir) all my drawing has lost in space. Current MyPaint get basic pseudo-vector ability which great for prototyping, symmetry mode and more supported colorspace. Actually there is several performance-related experimental features that can be enabled but I'm not getting there at the moment.

About the future of MyPaint well this is just an opinion, a speculation from experience. With MyPaint migrate to gtk-3 thus using pygi (and possibly python-3), It would be most tedious migration I've ever seen before for Windows platform, I meant where is PyGI now? Not even a release yet... and GTK-3? usable but not ready. Lets just hope Windows get some priority in the upstream sooner.

The dreaded question is how gtk-3 handle tablet this time? with gtk-2 there are many users complaining about their tablet which likely gdk<->wintab issue and since gtk is a gnome project (a dominant linux GUI), priority for other platform is somewhat lower than other cross-platform GUI. In the past decent releases has been fewer too. From interface point of view, last time I checked (gtk 3.4.4), it's already native themed but I can't made it work with mypaint since my experimental pygi build can't deal with gtkbuilder (maybe because I use 64bit off_t and time_t which is ABI breaking?). Anyway it still a bit early for pygi in windows...

This build here is a manual build and unlikely I will maintain that build environment anymore.

MyPaint_011212git.7z

Test and report bugs! your reports are very valuable in the release process, I believe the lag bug is workaround-able.