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 Fun with Perl is the name of a new mailing list announced this week. It appears to be intended primarily as a way of sending around interesting bits of Perl code, including bad, humorous, or obfuscated ways of doing things (as well as good stuff, of course). Python Computer programming for everybody. Guido van Rossum, along with a few other collaborators, sent in a proposal to DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) entitled "Computer Programming for Everybody." The purpose is to make programming accessible to a much larger portion of the population through the creation of an appropriate set of tools and training materials. "We compare mass ability to write and modify software with mass literacy, and expect that equally fundamental changes to society may ensue." The language of choice, of course, will be Python. This looks to be an interesting project. The Python Way. In response to a request, Tim Peters posted an off-the-cuff set of rules of thumb that make up "the Python way." For those who are interested, they are: Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those! (The full posting is here for those who are interested). JPython 1.1 beta 1 has been released. JPython is, of course, the "100% Pure Java" implementation of the Python language. Lots of fixes and improvements have been added; see the announcementfor details. French Python Day. The first Journée Python France was held in Paris on May 28. Pictures from the event, courtesy of Dinu Gherman, may be found on this starship page. A summary of the event (in French) may be found on Linux-center. Unfortunately, Babelfish does not want to translate that page. Mailing lists. A French language Python mailing list was created at the Journée Python France. A new Spanish-language list has also been announced. Mark Lutz in Boulder. Folks in the Boulder/Denver area, who are reading this on Thursday, June 10 might want to head to the Boulder Linux Users Group meeting, where Mark Lutz, author of the O'Reilly books on Python, will be talking to the group about the language. Details may be found in the meeting announcement. Tcl/tk Here's the latest Tcl-URL. Tcl/Tk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conferences. A part of the big O'Reilly conference will be the O'Reilly Tcl/Tk conference. A list of events for that conference has been posted; it consists of a large set of tutorials and invited talks. Mark out August 21-24 on your calendars. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	June 10, 1999

	Development projects GNOME Here is this week's GNOME summary courtesy of Havoc Pennington. Ht://Dig The Ht://Dig conference mentioned last week has been cancelled, unfortunately. There was a lot of interest in attending the show, but they were unable to get a sufficient number of developers together. They will try again in the future, perhaps in the context of some other gathering. KDE Once again, we have the weekly KDE summary, thanks to Navindra Umanee. Midgard Here's this week's Midgard update from Henri Bergius. Mozilla The Mozilla project has put out their Milestone 6 release; see the release notes for details on how to get and install the software, as well as a summary of where they stand. Progress continues with Mozilla. There are some hopes for an official "branded" release sometime this summer, though a number of the developers seem to think that is overly ambitious. Postfix/Secure Mailer Wietse Venema has posted an update on the status of the Secure Mailer project. The executive summary: Postfix is seeing a fair amount of serious, real-world use, but its licensing is keeping wider acceptance from happening. PostgreSQL The PostgreSQL team has announced the 6.5 beta release. This release "marks the development team's final mastery of the source code" they inherited from Berkeley. Included is better concurrency control, more SQL constructs, and a lot more; see the full list of changes to see all that has happened. VTad VTad is a new performance monitoring tool recently announced by Michael Blakeley. VTad is a rule-based system which watches the operation of a Linux computer, seeks out performance problems, and makes recommendations on how to fix them. It is being released under the Artistic License. Wine Ove Kaaven has posted a summary of Wine development events for the last week. There is some talk among the Wine developers of creating this sort of summary on a regular basis; stay tuned. Ove has also put together a Wine Who's Who page describing all of the currently active Wine developers. Zope Zope Portal Toolkit demon online. The folks at Digital Creations have put up their Zope Portal Toolkit demo on the Zope site. Note that the toolkit itself isn't yet available - they expect to put out a beta later this month. Meanwhile the demo may be interesting to those who didn't see it at Linux Expo. For the rest of the news from the Zope community, please see the weekly Zope summary put together, as usual, by Amos Latteier. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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