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 Cygnus announced an open source Java compiler, complete with a set of class libraries. Looks like good stuff. A security hole in the JDK 1.1.X and 1.2 (Java 2) has been reported by Gary McGraw and Edward W. Felten. "The flaw is in the "byte code verifier" component of the JVM. Under some circumstances the verifier fails to check all of the code that is loaded into the JVM." Sun issued a press release in response, indicating that they have created and tested a fix for the bug, which should be released in April with the JDK 1.1.8 and Java 2 version 1.2.1. The JDK 1.2 Status Page has not changed in the past week, so there is no new news on the project. Perl The Perl Institute has been dissolved. The Board of Directors for the Perl Institute voted unanimously on March 1st to disband the Perl Institute. All assets of the Perl Institute, including domainnames, etc., are to be given to Perl Mongers, the organization that supports the perl user groups. The transition leaves many questions up in the air. No official press release is available, but comments from the Perl News Page indicate that it was felt the Perl Institute was an ineffective effort at "top-down" management, while the perl community worked best in a "bottom-up" development mode. No mention of the dissolution has been seen on the newsgroups, indicating either that the word has been slow to get out out or that people are not concerned about it. The latter seems likely and would mirror the reasons given for dissolving it. A Perl Inference Engine version 0.02 is now available. Perl 5.005_03 was released on March 29th. This description of the new release was posted to the Perl News Page: "Included in the fixes for this release are many multithreading fixes and security fixes relating to running setuid scripts running on mounted nosuid filesystems and a buffer overflow in POSIX::strftime. Included amongst the updated documentation and modules are a new standard module (Dumpvar) and three new manpages (perlreftut, perlopentut, and perlthrtut). " Python Current rumor pegs the 1.5.2 release of Python around mid-April. This was mentioned by Guido in a noteabout a Tkinter bug in Misc.tkraise and Canvas.tkraise. Tcl/tk Tcl-URL! for this week is now available. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	April 8, 1999

	Development projects FIG For those interested in licenses: the FIG license is a new attempt at a free license which appears to be a combination of a license for written works and a general philosophy of life. The license is still under development, and the author claims that it will not go out as version 1.0 until Richard Stallman endorses it. Judging from this note we got from RMS, that endorsement is still a little ways away. GNOME The GNOME FAQ has been updated. The latest version is 1.0.5a. Control-Center version 1.0.5 has been released. GTransferManager 0.3.0 is out! The author, Bruno Pires Marinho, promises it is "almost a new program because of the new features" in his his announcement. A pile of cool features are promised in this latest release of gnumeric, version 0.23. Mozilla Two new Mozilla mailing lists have been announced, including netscape.public.mozilla.small-devices and netscape.public.mozilla.crash-data. Wine This InfoWorld story was linked to the front page of Wine headquarters soon after its release. It claims that Microsoft is considering opening up the source to Windows. Such a move, though still highly unlikely and more potentially just another ploy in Microsoft's normal games, would obviously be of great interest to the Wine crowd. Some might claim that Wine would no longer be needed. However, most likely, the benefits of having access to Microsoft's code would show up in faster development and progress for Wine, if the current painstaking reverse-engineering was no longer necessary. Zope The Zope Weekly News for this week provides a pointer to an article entitled "Zope Builds on its Success" by Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz. Paul Everitt will be giving a talk on "Open Source and Venture Capital" at the upcoming LinuxExpo and hopes to be showing off Zope 2.0 beta 1. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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