See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

• Proposed new rules for Tcl. John Ousterhout has announced a new set of proposed rules for the Tcl Core Team. This team has already been set up as the controlling body that decides what sorts of changes can go into the Tcl code base. It has a number of rules which are aimed at preserving code quality; it will be interesting to see how it all works out.

  The new part of the scheme is the set of proposed maintainer rules. The proposal sets up a group of maintainers, each of which has ownership of a portion of the Tcl/Tk code. All patches must go past the maintainers, who are the only ones who can commit changes. Patches that are not bug fixes must additionally be part of a "project" that has been previously approved by the core team.

  There has been a bit of opposition to the proposal. Not everybody likes the requirement that maintainers must be part of the Core Team - there are almost certainly people who are qualified for the maintainer role who are not on the Team. It also splits Tcl into a set of individual empires, and discourages people with a more general orientation.

  Also proposed is a Tcl Improvement Proposal (TIP) mechanism, which is meant to be the path by which new features are defined. It looks much like the Request For Comments (RFC) process that has served the Internet well for many years. It does differ, though, in that TIPs have their own markup scheme, based on embedded Tcl commands.

  Discussions are still underway, so it is not clear what rules will ultimately be adopted.

• The new Python development process is more similar than one might think. In the Python world, the changes took place earlier in the year when the Python group moved to BeOpen. This process has now been documented very nicely by A.M. Kuchling as part of the "what's new in Python 2.0" document.

  Python, too, has an (unnamed) team with the ability to commit changes; in this case, that team is made up of 27 people. This group, however, has no defined areas of competence; if you can commit to Python, you can commit anywhere.

  A completely open process, however, turned out to be problematic, with some changes going in that maybe should not have. So there is now a voting process for each patch; each developer can vote to accept or reject a patch, or, essentially, to abstain with a slight positive or negative bias. The one exception is that Guido van Rossum has the option of casting a +/- infinity vote, as befits his status as "benevolent dictator for life."

  There is also a mechanism like Tcl's TIP scheme - but it's called the "Python Enhancement Proposal" or PEP. Quite a few of these PEPs already exist; they can all be seen in the index of PEPs, otherwise known as PEP 0. Python developers avoided the temptation to use their language to mark up their documents - PEPs are written in plain text.

Browsers

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. The SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for September 25 is out. It looks at the new kmLinux distribution and several other topics.

High Availability

Interoperability

Network Management

On the Desktop

They are, of course, looking for people who want to help. For more information, see the Piper web page and this GNOME News writeup.

KDE 2.0 release schedule. An updated KDE 2.0 release schedule has been posted. It calls for a final freezing of the code on October 2, with only the most urgent of fixes allowed. The actual release is set to happen on October 16.

People behind KDE: Stephan Kulow. The "People Behind KDE" series continues with this interview with Stephan Kulow. " I guess, I'm one of the most central persons within KDE development. It's hard to develop for KDE and haven't heard of me. It's not that I'm that great, but that I give away CVS accounts, 'moderate' the kde-core-devel mailing list (I decide, who posts and who doesn't), I maintain all the stuff around building KDE."

Kugar 1.0 is out. The release of Kugar 1.0, a business report generator and viewer, has been announced. It relies on some other application to actually generate the data; once it's there, it applies a template to present the data in proper pointy-haired fashion. It's implemented as a KPart, and can thus be easily used within other KDE applications.

New KDE news site. Navindra Umanee, who wrote the KDE updates that appeared in LWN (and elsewhere) a while back, has resurfaced with KDE Dot News, a news site covering happenings in the KDE community.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Application Links
GIMP
Mozilla
Galeon
High Availability
ht://Dig
mnoGoSearch
MagicPoint
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

Open Source Code Collections
Berlios
Freshmeat
OpenSourceDirectory
Savannah
Le Serveur Libre
SourceForge
Sweetcode

Programming Languages

Java

Perl

Inlining other languages into Perl code. Looking for a way to make your Perl code more interesting? Or perhaps just faster? The Inline module (now at release 0.26) allows you to embed code from other languages in the middle of a Perl program. Currently the only supported "other language" is C; using C not only allows writing fast code, but that code gets full access to the internals of the Perl system. The potential for fun and adventure is obvious.

The real fun, though, will come when other languages are added. Inline assembly is obviously called for, and inline BASIC should sit well with the Perl crowd. But how could anybody resist the temptation of mixing in Lisp code? Maybe the ActiveState folks would like to do inline Visual Basic as well?

The Obfuscated Perl Contest will never be the same.

Report from YAPC::Europe. Thanks to Charlie Stross, we have a summary report from YAPC::Europe (YAPC being, of course, "Yet Another Perl Conference"), which was held in London last week. It looks like it was far too much fun...

Python

According to the Python 2.0 release schedule (otherwise known as PEP 200), the final release should happen around October 10.

Distutils 0.9.3 released. Distutils is a Python package intended to make the packaging and installation of modules easier and more standard. It's already part of the 2.0 beta release; if you're running an older Python system, however, you may need to install distutils separately to be able to install and use some modules. See the announcement for details.

This week's Python-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for September 25 with the latest Python news. Among other things, you can get an answer to the important question of just what "lambda" is good for.

Tcl/tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for September 25, with a roundup of what happened in the Tcl/Tk development world over the last wekk.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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