gPodder 2.20 "Neither Here Nor There" released

A new release of gPodder is out - this release is the last 2.x release before the "tres" release. Various bugfixes have been integrated, as well as new artwork merged from the tres branch and some updated translations from Transifex. The most important fixes:

• Fix download filename with invalid headers (bug 1440)
• Skip images in Media RSS if audio/video available (bug 1444)
• Use the standard logging module for liblogger (bug 1435)
• Fix the annoying AttributeError bug with gPodderWelcome (bug 1021)

You can see a full list of changes at gpodder.org/changelog/2.20.

Download: gpodder-2.20.tar.gz
md5sum: 4c09c1e2c3a3c291b5d1e9d185b59655
sha1sum: 21ae1255c63b69a8da2114d752ded07094097a8e

Please note that with this release, we now host source downloads on gpodder.org, because Berlios.de is shutting down at the end of the year. You can find all source downloads at http://gpodder.org/src/ and also get a specific source tarball via the URL shortcut gpodder.org/source/<version>. If you are a maintainer of a package of gpodder, you might want to update the source tarball link and/or the watchfile to be notified of new releases.

Packages for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5 have already been uploaded to maemo.org, packages for Debian, Ubuntu (PPA) and Windows will follow soon.

Planned downtime on October 26th

Our hosting company has informed us that there will be maintenance work on the network for the host on which the gpodder.org website is hosted. Other services should not be affected, but note that there might be problems accessing gpodder.org on October 26th from 12 AM to 6 AM Central European Time. After that, all our services should be back to normal.

Update: I've just received information that this maintenance will also affect the gpodder.net server, and it might also affect the bugtracker/wiki.

Future considerations: Gtk+ 3 and Python 3 support

Currently for our Desktop UI, we use PyGTK and GTK+ 2. In recent years and months, GObject Introspection has become available and with it new, dynamic bindings to GObject-based libraries like Gtk. Also, for future releases, the GObject Introspection-based Python bindings will be the only ones available, so it's a good idea to be forward-thinking and trying to see how good we can support gPodder.

I've now started an experimental branch based on the "tres" branch to see how well we can support it today, the result is gPodder running in Gtk 3:

You can grab the (highly experimental and unsupported) code from the tres-gtk3 branch on Github. This also paves the way for a possible upgrade to Python 3 in the future, as PyGObject bindings are already available on Python 3 (I haven't done any elaborate experiments with it apart from some very basic tests, though). However, neither PyGObject support nor Python 3 support will land in the first release of "tres" for practical reasons, but rest assured that we'll make the switch when we think it's a good idea (i.e. when PyGObject bindings are a bit more stable and more widespread in distributions). We will probably also switch to the new bindings first and only after we've stabilized the codebase there, we can then move on to working on the Python 3 support.

Python 3 support is more complicated, though - because some UIs (e.g. the QML UI, which depends on the PySide bindings to Qt) are not yet compatible with Python 3, or lack support elsewhere (e.g. on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan as found on the N950 or N9, only Python 2.6 is available, with no Python 3 in sight - at least not officially supported). Maybe that's something we can aim for in gPodder 4 then ;)