Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 21:58:51 +0200 (EET) From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi> Subject: MWS for 26th of January, 2000 (#29) To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, marty@linuxtoday.com, Greetings! As usual, there has been much activity around Midgard during the week. Alas, I've been far to busy too keep up with everything happening, and so we'll probably miss a couple of things in this week's MWS. ============================ ---------------------------- Current versions: Stable: 1.2.5 (Mad King) Devel.: 1.2.6 prerelease ---------------------------- ============================ Midgard RPMs for SuSE Malte Knoerr, the maintainer of Midgard RPMs for SuSE, has now made the first packages (Intel binaries and source RPMs) available for that platform. While these packages are still in testing phase, early reports seem to indicate that they work quite well. At this point the files can be found from the Development Material area of Midgard's Web site. They will probably be moved to the main download site soon, though. -> http://www.midgard-project.org/article/1478.html ---------------------------- Midgard on Windows The Open Server Architecture Project (a group making implementations of popular Unix server programs for the Win32 platform) is now porting Midgard for Windows. Their work is based on the 1.3 (Broken Shinai) experimental release. Daniel S. Reichenbach reports that they are now able to run Midgard with Microsoft's SQL Server 6.5 using the Win32 ODBC calls for data access. Also, he notes that it is possible to use Access 2000 as the data source. While this would be too slow for production use, many Windows-based developers might find it helpful for testing purposes. While the Midgard team has a clear Unix focus, there are many Web shops that are using a Microsoft platform instead, and it will be nice to see Midgard available for those developers. It also might serve to provide companies using Windows as their development platform an easy migration path to Unix systems as their performance needs increase. At this point the Win32 version of Midgard is still quite unstable, but we look forward to seeing a release version. Daniel has also promised to do a write-up on the current status of the project which we will try to publish soon after it becomes available. More information on the OpenSA project is available from their Web site. -> http://www.opensa.org/ ---------------------------- New documentation plans Many people have been interested in working on Midgard's documentation. So far this has however been quite difficult as the only ways to find information about how things work have been asking questions from Midgard developers or reading the sources. Now, it was clear that something ought to be done to make the process easier. Thinking about it, it became clear that there was one source of information that contained material on almost all aspects of Midgard - the mailing list archives. If some people were to collect all useful question-and-answer pairs from the archive and sort them into topics for placement in a FAQ, the writers would then just have to rewrite this information into a more consistent format and place it into the manual. This should make the documentation work much more doable, and also give developers a centralized source of information until the manual will be in a usable state. We now have some volunteers for this job and hope to get the process started as soon as possible. If you are interested in the state of Midgard's documentation or in contributing to it, you'll probably want to read the thread on this from the Midgard mailing list. -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?t=94885100600015&w=2&r=1 ---------------------------- Manual tarballs As the Midgard manual grows in content, many people have been complaining that it is only available as either part of the Midgard site or as SGML files in Midgard's CVS repository. Because of this, Emile has now started making tarballs of the manual in both HTML and plain text format available. The files can now be found from his own directory on our server, but we look to move them into the main site during the weekend. -> http://www.midgard-project.org/~emiliano/ ============================ ============================ About Midgard Midgard is a freely-available Web application development and publishing platform based on the popular PHP scripting language. It is an Open Source development project, giving you the freedom to create your solutions in an open environment. Midgard is the tool for creating, modifying and maintaining dynamic database-enabled web services. -> http://www.midgard-project.org ---------------------------- About MWS The Midgard Weekly Summary is a newsletter for the Midgard user and developer community. The MWS is currently being distributed in following mediums: -The Midgard Project's Web site -> http://www.midgard-project.org -Linux Weekly News -> http://www.lwn.net -Linux Today -> http://www.linuxtoday.com -Linux Developer's Network -> http://linuxdev.net -Open Source Writers Group -> http://www.oswg.org -Midgard mailing list If you would like to release it elsewhere, please contact Henri Bergius (Henri.Bergius@iki.fi). Previous issues of Midgard Weekly Summary can be found archived at the Midgard web site. -> http://www.midgard-project.org/topic/169.html ============================ /Bergie -- -- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- Henri.Bergius@iki.fi -- http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius