See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

CVS is a bottleneck in our infrastructure. On the one hand, CVS does something incredibly useful: it helps multiple maintainers coordinate changes software. On the other hand, CVS is very limiting: for the most part, it helps only the people who have write access to a repository. Anyone else offering changes still has to go the `diff/patch' route, relying on one of the maintainers to turn patch sets into CVS transactions.

Arch is designed to solve a number of problems that have come to plague CVS users as projects get bigger and harder to manage. The list of improvements includes:

• Atomic whole-tree commit operations.
• Better file and directory renaming capabilities.
• Replacement of the trunk topology for branching and merging with a star topology based system.
• Support for distributed code repositories.
• Automatic changelog maintenance.
• Configuration management for multiple package distributions.

In addition to porting arch to other platforms, there are a number of development areas that are in need of work, pitch in and lend a hand if you can. CVS will no doubt continue to be useful for a long time, but arch promises to remove some of the bottlenecks in the development of large open-source projects.

Subversion. Another free versioning system that has been brought to our attention is Subversion, see this Linux Journal article for a review. Subversion is undergoing active development, the 0.8 version was released January 15, 2002. Subversion features an Apache-BSD style license.

Subversions.gnu.org, however, is the name of a CVS server for the GNU project. (Thanks to Steven G. Johnson)

Audio Projects

Cow C++ library does wavs. Cow is a set of C++ classes for graphing and playing audio data. The current version is cow-0.0.2. Cow is distributed with a GPL license.

Ecasound 2.0.4 released. A new version of the Ecasound multi-track audio processor tool has been released. This version features bug fixes for LADSPA plugins and ALSA 0.9 and new documentation.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News. The January 15, 2002 edition of the Linux Documentation Project Weekly News is available. This week features a discussion of a new, but optional Wiki style interface for editing documentation A number of new and updated documents are also listed.

Electronics

New Icarus Verilog snapshot. The gEDA site lists a new snapshot of the Icarus Verilog electronic simulation language compiler. This is mainly a bugfix release, see the release notes for the details.

Embedded Systems

Diet libc 0.13. A new release of diet libc is available. Diet libc is a small version of the C library that is designed for embedded Linux applications.

Silicon Penguin updates. The Silicon Penguin embedded Linux site lists a number of new software packages in the applications, tools, libraries, drivers, graphics, and distributions sections.

Embedded Linux Newsletter. The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for January 10 is out, with the usual roundup of interesting happenings from the embedded Linux community.

January Embedded Linux Journal online. The January 2002 issue of the Embedded Linux Journal is now online, by way of LinuxDevices.com.

Mail Software

Mahogany 0.64 released. A new version of the Mahogany mail client is available. Version 0.64 features new IMAP and POP features.

Network Frameworks

OpenPKG 1.0 released. Ralf S. Engelschall has announced the release of OpenPKG 1.0. OpenPKG is a new package management system designed to allow the software on a network of heterogeneous systems to be managed as a single virtual platform. It has the potential to make life much easier for administrators of large networks. (Thanks to Giorgio Zoppi).

Network Management

First MaraDNS beta release. The first beta release of MaraDNS, a new DNS server written with security in mind, has been announced.

Web-site Development

Zope Members News. The latest from the Zope Members News includes an announcement of Zope 2.5 beta4, examination of ZDataQueryKit, a look at the ZOD Zope Documentation Tool, and more.

Bricolage Content-Management and Publishing System (use Perl). Bricolage is a Perl based content-management and publication system. The usePerl site comments on the new 1.2.0 version.

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

Desktop Development

Web Browsers

Galeon 1.1.2 released. Version 1.1.2 of the Galeon web browser is available. This release includes bug fixes, better auto completion, gestures, better IE favicon support, and more.

Desktop Environments

This week's GNOME Summary. The GNOME Summary for January 12 is out. Covered topics include new features in Nautilus, GUADEC 3 ("Everything from tree widgets presentations to talks on how to code when drinking lots of Guinness is welcome"), GNOME 2.0 status, and more.

Evolution 1.0.1 Released. Version 1.0.1 of Evolution has been announced by the Ximian folks. This release resolves some minor issues with the 1.0 release and improves stability and functionality.

People of KDE: Lubos Lunak. This week's People of KDE features Lubos Lunak, developer of KHotKeys.

Games

WorldForge Game Project Status. The WorldForge Game Project site features a recent project status report. Progress continues in a number of areas.

GUI Packages

Tutorial on coding with Python and Glade. Robert Laing has put together a tutorial on programming GNOME applications using Glade and Python.

Design Patterns in Qt (O'Reilly). Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, covers Design Patterns with Qt in an O'Reilly article. "Qt has the concept of signals and slots. This is a system that allows for component-based programming: Components can define signals that they emit under certain conditions and that have a defined list of parameters. Components can also define slots, which are nothing but ordinary C++ methods marked up with some preprocessor magic to be a slot."

Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News. A whole flood of AbiWord Weekly News editions came out this week, see issue #75, issue #76, issue #77, and issue #78 for all of the latest project status and info. The AbiWord development team is on a mission to find and fix as many bugs as they can.

Miscellaneous

This week in DotGNU. This Week in DotGNU for January 12 is out with a summary of the latest developments in the DotGNU project. Among other things, the summary includes new projects to develop a DotGNU business plan and a C# application server.

Programming Languages

C++

Initial gnomemm 2 release (C++ binding). The first releases of the gnomemm libgnome*mm libraries for GNOME2 have been announced. The libraries form the foundation for a GNOME2 C++ SDK.

Caml

Caml Weekly News for January 15, 2002. The latest Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include English translations of development docs, a packaging tool, an mlgmp bugfix release, pa_ocaml, editing mp3 tags from OCaml, and more.

This week on the Caml Hump. This week's Caml Hump looks at Mp3tag, a library containing functions to read or write mp3 tags, and pa_ocaml, a modified version of the ocamllex lexer generator.

Haskell

Glasgow Haskell Compiler version 5.02.2. A new version of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler has been released. Version 5.02.2 features a number of memory bug fixes. GHC is released under a BSD-style license.

Java

Using and Writing Java Servlets (Linux Journal). The Linux Journal features an introductory article by Petr Sorfa on Java Servelets. " In this article, I discuss the viability of using Java programs (servlets) with a web server. A servlet is a Java application that performs a task that may generate a dynamic web page or process input from a web page form."

Diagnosing Java Code: Depth-first visitors and broken dispatches (IBM developerWorks). Eric E. Allen discusses Java's depth-first visitors on IBM's developerWorks. "Allen discusses how it's possible to increase the terseness of your code through the use of depth-first visitors, a variant on the Visitor pattern."

Perl

Creating Custom Widgets (O'Reilly). Steve Lidie shows how to write widgets with Perl and Tk. "In this Perl/Tk article, I'll discuss balloon help, photos and widget subclassing. Help balloons can be attached to widgets, menu items, and, as we'll see here, individual canvas items."

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for January 14, 2002. The January 14, 2002 PHP Weekly Summary looks at past and upcoming PHP conferences, a CORBA interface called Universe, cURL support, new extensions for SOAP and OpenGL, and more.

Python

Python 2.1.2 released. Guido van Rossum has announced the release of Python 2.1.2 - a bug fix release for the Python 2.1 series.

This week's Python-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for January 14 with the latest from the Python development community. This week features Python 2.1.2c1, Pyreverse-0.1, XPipe, the Reptile Web Server, Python GUIs, IPy, Roundup 0.4.0b1, and more.

The latest from the Daily Python-URL. This week, the Daily Python-URL features articles on Bookland, a tool that generates ISBN and ISMN bar codes, PDFMap, a utility for generating maps in PDF format, the PyTraffic game, The HAP Python remote debugger, a refactoring browser known as Bicycle Repair Man, and more.

Ruby

The latest from the Ruby Garden. The latest items on the Ruby Garden look at adding an fsync method to the IO class and adding Java/c++ type method overloading to Ruby. The Ruby Weekly News also covers a number of Ruby projects.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for January 15, 2002 is out with the usual roundup of interesting stuff from the Tcl/Tk development community.

XML

Web Services Acronyms, Demystified (O'Reilly). Pavel Kulchenko defines a bunch of Web Services acronyms in an O'Reilly article. "More than twenty acronyms related to Web services came to light during 2001, and in this article I present a quick guide to the protocols and the specifications behind them, including a description of how they relate to each other and where each sits on the Web services landscape."

Working XML: Compiling XPaths (IBM developerWorks). Benoit Marchal continues his series on HC, the Java-based Handler Compiler (HC) project for SAX parsing. The HC Project is nearing its alpha release.

Miscellaneous

New Open64 compiler suite release. A new release of the Open64 C, C++, and Fortran90/95 compiler suite for the IA64 architecture is available.

Jext 3.1pre1 available. Version 3.1pre1 of the Jext programmer's editor is available. This release features changes to the core code, API, and GUI, as well as a few bug fixes.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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