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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


Browsers

Mozilla on SourceForge. VA Linux Systems, Inc. announced that mozilla.org will be making its browser source code available on SourceForge.

A report from the Mozilla developers' meeting is available on Slashdot.

Documentation

The Linux Documentation Project has submitted the following report, hopefully the first of many, by Stein Gjoen:

The LDP has now started work on creating a higher profile, including this semi-regular section in LWN and posting to comp.os.linux.announce. The LDP web site has been reworked and welcomes all Linux users. The goal is to produce and provide all sorts of quality Linux documentation in a number of languages.

A large number of new and updated documents has been uploaded so if your collection is more than 6 months old you are recommended to look for updates. The LDP has over 250 worldwide mirrors. Selecting a site from the list of available mirrors will help to provide you with fast, efficient access to the available content - regardless of where you are located.

Feedback is welcome and there is information on how to contribute as well as mailing lists and archives. The LDP also accepts submissions to the links and resources area.

Regular postings of HOWTOs to comp.os.linux.answers will also commence shortly and a number of other projects are planned which together with your feedback will make sure the LDP will serve the Linux community as a one stop source of documentation.

Linux Knowledge Base. After a long break, the Linux Knowledge Base weekly status report has resumed. Much is happening in the LKB realm as they aim for a beta release in mid-May.

Education

The April 10 SEUL/edu Linux in education report is out. It includes a discussion of the collaboration between the OpenClassroom project and Maxspeed, and covers a number of other topics as well.

High Availability

A new mailing list for piranha has been announced. It thus appears that piranha discussion will be moving out of the high-availability list and into its own domain.

Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News. This week's AbiWord Weekly News describes a relatively slow week in AbiWord development.

On the Desktop

Version 1.1 of the KDE tutorial is available. This tutorial is aimed at developers wanting to create KDE applications, rather than at users.

KDE2 alpha binaries are available for those who want to try life on the bleeding edge. Have a look at Christopher Molnar's posting for details on where to pick them up.

Gnucash will have a booth at Comdex/Chicago, thanks to the folks at LinuxMall.com. A number of the gnucash developers plan to be there.

The GNOME UI Summary has resumed. Things had been suspended for a while - the current issue covers the time period between January 5 and April 10.

Science

The third SEUL/sci Linux in science report is out, with a survey of useful tools for scientific users.

Website Development

Geoff Hutchison writes in again with a ht://Dig development update. Most importantly, version 3.2.0b2 was just released on Tuesday after clearing a few last-minute showstopper bugs. This version moves another large step towards a 3.2.0 release. Recent discussion on the developer list has been on cleanups in the search and configuration code and improving the performance of the new database format. Geoff also notes that he will be at COMDEX/Spring, and is organizing a last-minute BOF session during the show. Anyone interested should contact him at ghutchis@wso.williams.edu.

Zope Weekly News. This week's Zope Weekly News (by Mike Pelletier) covers a new low-cost Zope hosting service, some new Zope products, and more.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


April 13, 2000


Project Links
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High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
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Freshmeat
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Development tools


Java

Blackdown Java 2 Compatibility Kit (JCK) MIPS status. The Blackdown Java 2 JCK Status page is now set up to start tracking the JCK status for Java 2 on the MIPS platform. No test reports have been published as of yet.

Tritonus 0.2.0 is out. Tritonus is an implementation of the Java Sound 1.0 API; it currently runs on Intel Linux systems. Licensing is GPL. More information can be found in the announcement.

Perl

Processing XML with Perl is an article on XML.com on how to use the Perl XML modules.

Python

Garbage collection for Python. Python has, since the beginning, used a reference counting mechanism for memory management. Every object in a Python program has a reference count with it. The object will continue to exist as long as that reference count is greater than zero; when the last reference goes away, the object is deleted. This technique has the advantage of being quick, and of (usually) realizing immediately when an object may be recovered.

The problem with reference counts is that they fail whenever circular references to objects are created. These references can be easy to create; once they exist, they can keep the reference count for the objects involved from ever going to zero. The result is lost memory which, in some situations, can be a serious problem.

Enter the garbage collection for Pythonpatch. Garbage collection replaces reference counting with an occasional scan which identifies all memory which is no longer reachable. Such memory is "garbage" and can be reused. The author, Neil Schemenauer, claims that the overhead of his patch is minimal, and that it solves most of the problems associated with reference counting.

Interestingly, this patch does not replace reference counting. Instead, it relies on the existing reference counts to free most objects, and concentrates only on finding circular references. In this way, the patch is much smaller, and the algorithm implemented much more specialized. It may well be worth a look for applications where circular references are a problem.

Python 1.6 alpha 2 is out. See the announcement for details. This is very much an alpha release, and not to be used for production work. Nonetheless, Guido is asking for as many people as possible to help test it out as he tries to put together a highly robust 1.6 release by the beginning of June.

Tcl/tk

Tcllib 0.3 has been released. Tcllib is a collection of useful utilities, put together by Eric Melski, "the other Tcl guy" at Scriptics. This version is considered a "pre-1.0 alpha release." More information in the announcement.

This week's Tcl-URL has been posted. It is a "time warp" issue, covering back into late March.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

 
Language Links
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Haskell
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IBM Java Zone
Perl News
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