Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 21:58:51 +0200 (EET)
From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi>
Subject: MWS for 26th of January, 2000 (#29)
To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, marty@linuxtoday.com,

Greetings!

As usual, there has been much activity
around Midgard during the week. Alas, 
I've been far to busy too keep up with 
everything happening, and so we'll 
probably miss a couple of things in 
this week's MWS.

============================
----------------------------

Current versions:
	Stable: 1.2.5 (Mad King)
	Devel.: 1.2.6 prerelease 

----------------------------
============================

Midgard RPMs for SuSE

Malte Knoerr, the maintainer of Midgard
RPMs for SuSE, has now made the first
packages (Intel binaries and source RPMs)
available for that platform.

While these packages are still in testing
phase, early reports seem to indicate that
they work quite well.

At this point the files can be found from 
the Development Material area of Midgard's 
Web site. They will probably be moved to
the main download site soon, though.

  -> http://www.midgard-project.org/article/1478.html

----------------------------

Midgard on Windows

The Open Server Architecture Project 
(a group making implementations of popular 
Unix server programs for the Win32 platform) 
is now porting Midgard for Windows. Their 
work is based on the 1.3 (Broken Shinai)
experimental release.

Daniel S. Reichenbach reports that they
are now able to run Midgard with Microsoft's
SQL Server 6.5 using the Win32 ODBC calls 
for data access. Also, he notes that it is
possible to use Access 2000 as the data source.
While this would be too slow for production
use, many Windows-based developers might find
it helpful for testing purposes.

While the Midgard team has a clear Unix focus, 
there are many Web shops that are using a 
Microsoft platform instead, and it will be 
nice to see Midgard available for those 
developers. It also might serve to provide  
companies using Windows as their development  
platform an easy migration path to Unix 
systems as their performance needs increase.

At this point the Win32 version of Midgard
is still quite unstable, but we look forward
to seeing a release version. Daniel has also
promised to do a write-up on the current
status of the project which we will try to
publish soon after it becomes available.

More information on the OpenSA project
is available from their Web site.

  -> http://www.opensa.org/

----------------------------

New documentation plans

Many people have been interested in
working on Midgard's documentation. So 
far this has however been quite difficult
as the only ways to find information about
how things work have been asking questions
from Midgard developers or reading the
sources.

Now, it was clear that something ought
to be done to make the process easier.
Thinking about it, it became clear that
there was one source of information that
contained material on almost all aspects
of Midgard - the mailing list archives.

If some people were to collect all useful
question-and-answer pairs from the archive
and sort them into topics for placement
in a FAQ, the writers would then just have
to rewrite this information into a more 
consistent format and place it into the
manual.

This should make the documentation work
much more doable, and also give developers
a centralized source of information until
the manual will be in a usable state.

We now have some volunteers for this job
and hope to get the process started as soon
as possible. If you are interested in the
state of Midgard's documentation or in
contributing to it, you'll probably want
to read the thread on this from the Midgard
mailing list.

  -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?t=94885100600015&w=2&r=1

----------------------------

Manual tarballs

As the Midgard manual grows in content,
many people have been complaining that
it is only available as either part of
the Midgard site or as SGML files in
Midgard's CVS repository.

Because of this, Emile has now started
making tarballs of the manual in both
HTML and plain text format available.

The files can now be found from his
own directory on our server, but we
look to move them into the main site
during the weekend.

  -> http://www.midgard-project.org/~emiliano/

============================
============================

About Midgard

Midgard is a freely-available Web application 
development and publishing platform based on 
the popular PHP scripting language. It is an 
Open Source development project, giving you the 
freedom to create your solutions in an open 
environment. Midgard is the tool for creating, 
modifying and maintaining dynamic 
database-enabled web services.

  -> http://www.midgard-project.org

----------------------------

About MWS

The Midgard Weekly Summary is a newsletter 
for the Midgard user and developer community.

The MWS is currently being distributed in
following mediums:

 -The Midgard Project's Web site
   -> http://www.midgard-project.org

 -Linux Weekly News
   -> http://www.lwn.net

 -Linux Today
   -> http://www.linuxtoday.com

 -Linux Developer's Network
   -> http://linuxdev.net

 -Open Source Writers Group
   -> http://www.oswg.org

 -Midgard mailing list

If you would like to release it elsewhere,
please contact Henri Bergius 
(Henri.Bergius@iki.fi).

Previous issues of Midgard Weekly Summary can 
be found archived at the Midgard web site.
  -> http://www.midgard-project.org/topic/169.html

============================

/Bergie

-- 
-- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- Henri.Bergius@iki.fi --
               http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius