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 Perl Perl 5.005_57 has been released. This is a development release, part of the process of getting ready for the 5.006 release sometime this summer. Tom Christiansen, who announced this release (which was produced by Gurusamy Sarathy), suggests that those who do not want to be on the bleeding edge may still be interested in this release for the greatly reworked and extended documentation that comes with it. See the announcement for details and release notes. Tom has also put out a documentation releasecontaining only the updated documentation. Perl in Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson's latest, Cryptonomicon, includes an encryption scheme called "Pontifex," and a Perl script which implements it. Both the script and an explanation of how the encryption algorithm works can be found at Bruce Schneier's web site. Python Here is this week's Python-URL. They are looking for a volunteer to help in getting Python-URL out every week, drop a line if you can help. For Python GNOME hackers, new versions of gnome-python and pygtk have been announced. Tcl/tk The second TclPro 1.3 sneak preview release is out, see the announcement for details. The big change in this release is that it includes the TclPro compiler. Here is this week's Tcl-URL. The Call for Papers for the 7th USENIX Tcl/Tk Conference has gone out. The conference is happening February 14-18 in Austin, TX; paper submissions are due by September 1, 1999. See the CFP for details. A new version of Jacl and Tcl Blend has been announced. Mix your Java and Tcl like never before... See the announcement for more. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	May 27, 1999

	Development projects GNOME A GNOME publishing company? See this note from Miguel de Icaza. He would like to see a lot more documentation written for various aspects of the GNOME project, and has pretty much decided that the publishing business, as it stands now, is inadequate to the task. He would like to put together a free software publishing company that would keep the documentation freely available and pass through more of the receipts from book sales to the authors. There is a mailing list for those who are interested in participating. GNOME-related releases this week: gnosamba 0.3.3, a GUI front end for Samba configuration. Formerly known as GtkSamba. gnome-libs 1.0.pre10, GNOME libraries. The real 1.0.10 release may well be out by the time you read this. GnomeICU 0.64, ICQ client. KDE LinuxToday has run an article by Kurt Granroth describing what to expect in KDE 2.0. Worth a read. Stephan Kulow announced that he has started work on a new speed/size optimization feature for the KDE configure scripts. Based on his preliminary analysis, this option has the potential to more than halve the size of the resulting binary as well as to significantly decrease CPU usage. Kurt Granroth has done a little analysis of his own. KAbiWord. Andrew Wansink briefly announced that he has started work on a port of AbiWord to KDE. This announcement sparked a little controversy, bringing about the realization that KOffice has been quite usable at several stages in the development, yet no interim user release has ever been made and the lone Freshmeat announcement dates back to last October. The fact that the KOffice codebase has now been ported to KDE 2.0 makes the matter of an interim release a little trickier. Fortunately for Debian users, and thanks to the formidable efforts of Ivan E. Moore II, debian packages for kde-cvs and koffice-cvs will eventually be available. A replacement for the Gimp?* In light of various difficulties involved with a KDE interface for the Gimp, there is talk of developing a new easy to use and powerful image manipulation tool for KDE. Developers interested in such an effort should contact Michael Koch. More KDE Quickies. In other news, the KDE team has made the move to the latest and greatest MICO 2.2.6; Bo Thorsen gave us this update on KodeKnight development; Antonio Larrosa announced and implemented a new controversial feature for Konsole and other applications: background transparency; Stephan Kulow declared -- and executed -- intentions of revising the KDE file hierarchy standards with an eye to enabling better compliance with the FHS; and finally, for a cheap laugh, you might want to see how aggressively the KDE developers have been porting over to QString in light of the Unicode support in Qt 2.0. You, too, can own your very own KDE T-shirt with "Konqi" the dragon. See this page for details. (Many thanks to Navindra Umanee for providing material for the KDE section). Littlefish Littlefish is a project which intends to produce a patient information management system for health care providers in the third world. Such providers need all the help they can get, and have little or no funding for commercial software. A freely-available alternative could do a world of good. Littlefish is looking for people to help out, please see their announcement for more information. Wine Wine release 990523 has been announced. This is a developers only release. Zope The Zope booth at Linux Expo was mobbed. The level of interest was quite high, actually getting to the booth was often difficult. Definitely a busy place. The new Portal Toolkit looks awfully nice; we predict that it will be showing up on numerous web sites shortly. Paul Everitt talked about Zope and venture capital at the Expo. Some coverage of the talk can be found in our Linux Expo coverage. The slides for the talk have also been posted on Digital Creations' web site. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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