LWN - Development

Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Development page.	Development tools Java To stem the incredible flood of requests for information about the status of the JDK 1.2 Linux port, Kevin Hendricks posted this status report, explaining that a bug in the native threading or linuxthreads that has to be fixed and describing how they are attempting to deal with the problem. No time estimate can be given because they can't state when they will find the source of the bug. Meanwhile, 1.2v3 of the TYA JIT compiler has been announced. The new version contains bug fixes and minor speed improvements, plus a patch provided by Kazuyuki Shudo and a fix for a bug report made by Lukas Knecht. You can download the new version from this location. Perl Net::RawIP version 0.03. manipulate raw IP packets and Ethernet headers Puppet::Show, a utility class to manage a Puppet::Body class through an optional GUI Tk::TreeGraph, a canvas specialized to draw trees with arrows and nodes DbFramework version 1.06, a collection of classes for manipulating Mysql databases HTML::Clean, new module that encapsulates a number of HTML optimizations and cleanups to create HTML that loads faster and displays properly in more browsers Python Python.org went down due to hardware problems on Saturday. It was brought back up fairly quickly, but that required cannibalizing parts from the Python CVS mirror, so the CVS mirror went down instead. It was back up by Monday. This week's Python-URL! newsletter is now available. Smalltalk Version 0.2 of QTalk and GTalk are now available. As described in last week's development section , GTalk and QTalk are forks in the Squeak Smalltalk implementation that is aimed at integrating GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT. With last week's announcement of the availability of a commercial version of VisualWorks for Linux on Intel, John Rickenbrode askedthe question as to whether there might someday be a Linux/PPC version. Eliot Miranda unofficially responded with this note mentioning that an Alpha Linux port is underway and discussions are on-going regarding potential PPC and ARM (Netwinder) ports. Along with that information, the comments on the comp.lang.smalltalk newsgroups seem to indicate that VisualWorks 4.0 should be on the scene before the end of March. Tcl/tk This week's edition of Tcl-URL! is now available. Hot items include good business reports from Scriptics and tcl articles in the January special issue of ;login. New software announcements include version 1.1 of Steffen Tregger's pure Tcl and a pure Tcl multicolumn listbox widget from Bryan Oakley. moodss version 6.1, modular spreadsheet	January 21, 1999

	Development projects Apache The Apache Group has released version 1.3.4 of the Apache HTTP server. It boasts over "90 significant improvements to the server", including prevention of some denial-of-service attacks, support for 3rd-party WebDAV modules, new content negotiation, and much more. The Apache Team states in their press release that they consider this to be the best version of Apache available and strongly recommend that people upgrade as soon as possible. Icecast Co-developer Jack Moffitt dropped us a note about the release of icecast, an MP3 audio broadcasting system that is freely available (GPL). The system aims to be " shoutcast compliant by version 1.0" and is apparently well on its way toward that goal. Gnome The Preening Bonobo release of the GNOME libraries (0.99.4) has been announced. Although Miguel calls it a "preening release" (fewer parasites/bugs), the announcement contains a long list of minor features that have been added to the individual libraries as well as bug fixes. Midnight Commander file manager 4.5.9 is out. It requires gnome-libs-0.99.4. Gnumeric 0.7, dubbed "Speedy Manatee", has been announced. The new feature list indicates that compatibility with Excel has improved, menu hints are now available and the menus have been standardized, plus a lot of additional features and bug fixes. gdm 0.7, a re-implementation of the well known xdm program has been released. This version has full support for managing local displays. Support for remote displays is schedule for version 0.8. Rodrigo Moya has released version 0.1 of GNOME-Sql, as he calls his tool for accessing databases from different RDBMS. His announcement mentions that only Postgres support is currently present, though MySQL and ODBC will be added. Linuxconf Alpha release 0.4.2 of the isdnadmin module is now available. It is only recommended for those experienced with ISDN. Mozilla/Netscape LinuxPower.org has done an interview with Jamie Zawinski, of Mozilla.org fame. It contains information about what will in Mozilla and some great comments about how the open source development model is helping: "I think that by being out in the open like this, we're making decisions better, and reaching the right decisions more often. Secrecy is the enemy of correctness." The draft of Netscape's Open Directory license is available for review. Here are some comments on the intent of the license. Wine The New York Times featured Wine in their January 18th issue. The article (registration required) does not consider Wine to be successful, as of yet, but touches upon Corel's new involvement and Bacchus, a grass-root funding effort started by Hal Bennett. Douglas Ridgway wrote in to report that a disk failure on WineHQ happened on January 15th. They were able to retrieve nearly all of the data on the system, but the mailing list information was lost. If you were previously subscribed to one of the wine mailing lists, you will need to subscribe again. Jean-Louis Thirot posted a quick note outlining what needs to be done to gather information on a problem and send it into the Wine developers. This information probably also exists on WineHQ, but the posting is good, brief, step-by-step set of instructions. Jimen Ching is now the Willows TWIN code maintainer, a position previous held by Rob Farnum. Here is a note describing the change and how to reach Jimen. Zope A Zope development roadmap was posted(along with an addendum about Zope Classes) by Paul Everitt this week. Their goals are ambitious. Perhaps more important for Zope users: three new Zope guides have been published, greatly increasing the amount of Zope documentation available. See the announcement to see what's out there and to get to it.
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