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From: "Ken Pooley" <kpooley@sewanee.edu>
To: "MWS" <mws@midgard-project.org>
Subject: MWS 20th of December 2000 (#54)
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 10:16:39 -0600



Greetings!

A hearty holiday greeting for everyone! I know that not everyone in the wide
world of Midgard follows the movements of Santa Claus with the same fervor
of my 2 year old but just the same I hope everyone is well and celebrates
one of the many holidays that happens about now, and I hope you have a great
time doing it!


Contents:
Editor's Note
The final candidate for 1.4 should be here this week
	 1.4 is about here and that is a good thing.
Armand Verstappen  has instituted a nightly build system
	To help the test process and insure better builds.
Midgard 2.0 is on a weekly schedule
	Ami Ganguli on where we go from here.

============================
The final candidate for 1.4 should be here this week
----------------------------
Midgard 1.4 is currently in a code freeze and should see an official final
candidate release on December 25th (insert St Nickalus, or St. “Emile”claus
puns here). At this point it appears that this will be a great release,
Repligard has full functionality and will be included as well as Asgard.
There is a planned January release, 1.4.1, which will include a few bug
fixes and PHP4 compatibility. A new feature of the Midgard site, the Midgard
Bug Tracker has already proven its worth in getting 1.4 out and should
ensure that 1.4.1 is a stable release that addresses any problems that come
up in the next weeks. Any one using 1.4b7 or 1.4, as of next week, is
encouraged to go to: http://www.midgard-project.org/bugs/ to check for known
problems and report any problems that arise. The application also allows
everyone to see what problems are outstanding and how quickly they are taken
care of once reported. At the very least it is pretty impressive to see how
fast most issues are dealt with.


============================
Armand Verstappen has instituted a nightly build system
----------------------------
Armand Verstappen has been working on a nightly build system to help
facilitate testing of both the build process and the software in the CVS.
The system builds Redhat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.2 RPMs, the Redhat machine is
sponsored by Skallen and Michael Ed in Sweden and the Mandrake files are
built on a machine sponsored by Envida. Currently the site at
http://nightlybuilds.midgard-project.org/ is a download location only but
Armand is working on providing the means to comment on the build, install
and testing process in a manner that benefits the whole community. There are
also plans to extend the build environments to cover more flavors of
distribution including Red Hat 7.0 and Debian. In addition to general help
with design and coding for the site Armand is looking for contributions,
including the following, to get new distributions going:
- a pristine build environment for that distribution, reachable from the
Internet.
- For RPM-based distro's:
	- Information on how to detect the specific distribution,
	- Information on the distribution specific paths and file locations.
- For non-rpm-base distributions:
	- Information on how to detect the specific distribution,
	- Buildscript needs to be written separately for distribution,
	  to be integrated into the main buildscript later.

Hopefully the extra work that is being put into smoothing out the
installation of Midgard will pay off with more users able to get it up and
running in a quick and timely manner.  At the same time this attention to
packages and distributions should make it easier to upgrade an installation
once it is in production.


============================
Midgard 2.0 is on a weekly schedule.
----------------------------
Ami has continued to plug away on the development of the next generation of
Midgard application, Midgard 2.0.  Last week saw the release of 1.9.1 and
this week will see 1.9.2 follow. This week is we should the introduction of
the “client interface” API that allows the Midgard to communicate with
Apache, or other client applications like  the GNOME-VFS module, Perl and
PHP. Ami will be looking for feedback on what he puts together on this
front. This week’s version is the beginning of a rewrite or the core of the
application. The rewrite will happen in two phases, first all of the code
will be rewritten cleanly from the top down. The second stage will go from
the bottom to the top debugging each module on the way. The goal is to make
this core rewrite as final as possible so everybody who feels like they have
something to add should review this rewrite closely. Once this stage is
finished work can start on the objects which bring visible functionality to
the application. At that point it will be much easier for a wider range of
participants to help and the pace of development should pick up.

Also, in an interesting development, Ami has been looking into writing a
module for GNOME’s new Nautilus file manager and the Gnome-VFS module in
general. On one hand, this should be a great proof of concept for showing
the flexibility of the new Midgard and its focus on a wider range of data
options. At the same time building an API for the Gnome file system will
allow, in theory, any tool written with VFS module compatibility to open and
save directly to the Midgard 2 datastore. Time constraints are holding this
back and Ami would welcome any help possible on this part of the coding.
============================

About Midgard



Midgard 1.4 is a content publishing tool for small and medium sized sites.
It is based on Apache, MySQL and PHP. The application and its documentation
are licensed GPL, LGPL and GFDL. This licensing strategy guarantees that
developers, webmasters, ISPs, and business managers are investing in a
strategy where they're free to share solutions and participate in the
application design.

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



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



About MWS


The Midgard Weekly Summary is a bi-weekly newsletter

for the Midgard user and developer community,

as well as the extended web community.

If you would like to release it or publish it,

please contact Ken Pooley

(kpooley@sewanee.edu).


Previous issues of Midgard Weekly Summary can

be found archived at the Midgard web site.

-> http://www.midgard-project.org/topic/169.html



Midgard mailing list.

The Midgard mailing list is one of the most vital and

visible aspects of the Midgard Community. Questions

get answered, suggestions debated and work gets done.

E-mail:midgard@greywolves.org


----------------------------
Places to see Midgard in Action:
http://www.midgard-project.org
http://www.hklc.com
http://www.5fthigh.com/
http://www.linuxde.org/
http://www.hec.nl/
http://www.stonejobs.com/
http://www.cruisexcursions.com/

-More to come


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