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 As promised, Steve Byrne's has created a new web-page just for status information on the JDK 1.2 as it makes its way through the JCK process. Last updated Saturday, the page currently only has information for the x86 ports. The page is nicely color-coded, so when a line in the table goes green, we'll know all the JCK tests are being passed for that specific platform. For now, nothing is green. Does this really help you know when the JDK 1.2 will be released? No, no one knows when all the tests will run successfully. However, it sure is a lot more fun to check the status on this page and wait for changes than to just be told to check back in about a month. Thanks, Steve! JavaWorld published a review of JVMs. The results is very interesting. Surprisingly, IBM's JDK 1.1.7 on OS/2 actually had the best performance with the Tower TowerJ 2.2.7 on Linux coming second. The Blackdown Linux port is definitely lower in performance than these front-runners, but garnered some good comments, particularly for the performance improvements from tya. It is unfortunate that they were unable to get good results from their efforts to test Kaffe. The latest JDC newsletter is available. Perl The latest development version of perl, 5.005_55, was made available on February 18th. The Second German Perl Workshop is scheduled for March 8-10, 2000. More details are promised for the near future, along with a wrap-up of the first Workshop. Keep an eye on the Perl Institute's News page for new information. yapc: yet another perl conference, organized by Kevin Lenzo, is a low-cost conference scheduled for June 24 and 25, 1999 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a grass-roots conference, with beginnings in various Perl mongers groups. O'Reilly will be hosting Perl tutorial programs in Boston, Massachusetts on April 27th and 28th, and Santa Clara, California, May 4th and 5th. Check on the O'Reilly site for more details. A discount awaits you if you are a Perl Monger planning on attending the Internet '99 Conference in Lisbon, Portugal ( on March 15th and 16th. Contact Brent Michalski for more details. Perl Training is available in Melbourne, Australia. Check this website for details. Python Python 1.5.2 beta 2 has been released. The actual 1.5.2 release is still scheduled for mid-march. Information on downloading this version is available. There is also a a new version of Fnorb - the Python CORBA ORB - out there. The latest Python-URL! was released on February 23rd. This week's edition was moderated by Mike Orr. Tcl/tk This week's TCL-URL!, moderated by Mark Roseman, is now available.	February 25, 1999

	Development projects GDB HP is releasing a version of GDB customized for HP-UX. Their website indicates that the WDB, as they call it, is supported on HP-UX Releases 10.20 and 11.00, and debugs HP C, HP aC++, and Fortran programs. They also list an impressive number of HP-specific enhancements, including support for HP-Fortran, for a curses-based terminal user interface (in addition to gdb's line-mode) and a subset of XDB commands. Put together with their plans to provide broad support to the open development community and the results are bound to be beneficial. Gnome The Gnome port of NetHack has been officially released. GnomeHack 1.0.0 is the popular role-playing game based loosely on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons(tm). A screenshot is available, along with a home page. The Gnome cross-referencing tool, LXR, is back. Martin Baulig was finally able to determine the cause of the problems that had broken it. Gnumeric went through two releases this week. The latest is gnumeric 0.14, dubbed "Simplified Bonobo" by Miguel. Martin Baulig has released LibGTop 0.100.0. Here is his announcement, which also contains some comments on the license for LibGtop, which will remain LGPL, but not necessarily because that is what Martin would like to see ... Midnight Commander 4.5.18 is out. This latest version contains mostly bug fixes but has new device support and a cool hack. icecast With the release of version 1.1 of icecast, the icecast team are excited to announce that they have pulled ahead of shoutcast in available features and performance. A great article on icecast is available on the mp3.com site. It talks about the reasons for developing icecast even though a Linux port of shoutcast was available and details a lot of what they've accomplished so far. KDE Linux-Magazin will be regularly producing Korner, a feature on KDE. For more details, see this note. Updates to kweather, kspline0 and kmandel have been announced by Juergen Hochwald. Version 0.6 of Phil Thompson's Python Bindings, pyKDE, has been announced. They include support for KDE 1.1 as well as many new Qt and KDE classes. As mentioned last week, KDE 1.1 rpms for SuSE are now available. Some people's favorite text editor, KFTE now has a new version out. The primary features of the new release seem to be bug fixes that actually allow it to compile out of the box and work as installed. That's always a good place from which to start! LIMP The Linux Image Montage Project (LIMP) is a community-building exercise that is "attempting to distill Linux community, company, and orginizations spirit into one very cool looking poster". The poster will be a montage of smaller images built up into a version of Larry Ewing's Tux. The result will be available for free on the web-site, or in 4-color print from the LinuxMall. Linux Standard Base A new beta version of the LSB-FHS test suite has been released. The Linux Standard Base folks are hoping that they will get testers on as many different distributions and platforms as possible in order to weed out any remaining dependencies there. Head on over to the download directory to find README files and the release itself. LinuXML The LinuXML project is attempting to change the way many users experience Linux by modifying commands to produce output in XML. Said output can then be more easily parsed and displayed by higher-level tools. They are looking for "feedback and helpers," see their announcement for more. Mozilla/Netscape Netscape has released an updated version of their license. The new license and generated quite a bit of comment on Slashdot. Overall, after a bit of sifting, response to the license changes appears to be mostly favorable, which is clearly the hoped-for result, based on comments in the FAQ. Doczilla, a full-fledged SGML and XML browser based on Mozilla code, is scheduled for release next quarter. Doczilla's home page and the official press release are available. Apprunner, dubbed "the future of Navigator", is now being included in the nightly Mozilla builds with a new UI in place. For more details, check out MozillaZine. Wine The Wine FAQ has been updated. As of February 24th, the Wine FAQ has returned, after an extensive delay. The Case for Wine (2) is a summary by Francois Gouget on reasons for working with Wine. Zope Zope 1.10.2 has been released. This release contains a lot of bug fixes, and adds a management interface for the importing and exporting of objects. The folks at Digital Creations hope that this is will be the last release for their non-developer version for a while. Also released: the confera threaded discussion system under an open source license. See their announcement for more.
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