There has been a popular demand of some kind of newsletter informing of what's going on in the Pike community. Especially what's happening with regard to Pike development and stuff associated to that. The aim of this newsletter is to address this demand. To keep this newsletter from just being a compilation of recent changes in the cvs, bug-fixes et cetera this first issue is also a call for contributions to making this the best source of interesting information on what's happening in and around Pike. Please send me anything you would like to have communicated to the Pike community and potential new Pike users. My goal is to make this newsletter interesting for any pike user, regardless of experience. I could see many things fit in here. Stories on programming projects built in Pike, information on new features, reports from events where Pike has been mentioned. You name it! To end the ramble. I hope to be able to publish this newsletter at a regular basis. Depending on how much material is available a good guess would be somewhere about once a month. Credits must go to Martin Nilsson for collecting a significant part of the information published in this first newsletter and for encouraging (persuading?) me to take on this task. Hope you enjoy this first newsletter! // M The formal paperwork is taking its time at Roxen. The last thing I heard was that lawyers are now involved in the process of creating the actual contract, so hopefully we'll get the final version soon. Regarding the future of Pike at IDA I got the following from Martin Nilsson: Over at IDA we are discussing exactly what research areas the effort should be focused on during the next years. It is interesting and encouraging to see just the amount of effort just put into making a list of possible topics. I was hoping that an initial semi-official list would be ready for this newsletter, but it will probably take a week or two more. Interestingly IDA explicitly said that they want their work to have a good balance between scientific value and direct practical use for the Pike community. Another positive news item from IDA is that they are willing to host a AutoBuild cluster to ensure a wide range of supported platforms. On a more practical side Johan Sundström (jhs) has come a long way in his effort to refactor the CVS browser from community.roxen.com. This new version, presumably destined for GPL, is an almost complete rewrite of the old CVS browser and fixes a lot of problems in the back end. While creating this probably-second-to-none CVS browser jhs created a RCS file parser, which is checked in into the Pike 7.3 CVS tree (Parser.RCS). Perhaps the most useful bug-fix to know about is that UNDEFINED symbol nowdays really is the zero-typed value (ie. zero_type(UNDEFINED) returns 1). It may now be used instead of the odd ([])[0] in order to get a zero-typed value. Bill Welliver contributed some patches which should make Pike compile fine on late MacOS X installations. Other than that a few bugs causing segmentation faults and a Makefile dependency bug which caused sporadic make failures were fixed. Bug summary Open bugs: 105 Fixed bugs since 2002-02-01: 24 New bugs since 2002-02-01: 27 New bugs since 2002-02-01 already fixed: 14 Pike 7.4 blocker bugs left: 15 We've had a few interesting additions and changes in the CVS over the last month. I've already mentioned the RCS parser. See [1]. At about the same time as the RCS parser was added, Hilfe was updated to use the Pike parser to parse its input. During the rewrite of Hilfe a few other features such as more correct typing and result history were added. Start Hilfe and type "help" and "help me more" for information about how to use the new features. During the implementation of the new Hilfe some serious bugs in the C and Pike parsers were fixed. The history data type (ADT.History) was also added as an attempt to modularise the code. Most of the new Hilfe was written by Martin Nilsson. A new module called Local is added, which enables you to put your own Pike modules in a directory independent of your Pike installation. It is even possible for users on the system to have their own set of modules available under Local. Great for educational purposes. See [2]. In the category small but useful changes the wrapper for one-line Pike execution (pike -e) now passes arguments and environment variables to the code in the variables argc, argv and env. Both the wrapper extension and the Local module are the brain children of mine (Mikael Brandström). For those of you writing time critical applications Per Hedbor has donated System.Time and System.Timer to get sub-second precision. Documentation at [3] and [4]. Per also did some MMX changes to the operation image_object/x where x is an int or a float. The speedup on his machine was about 10'000 times. Marcus Comstedt has added the (deprecated) hash function MD4 to the Crypto library, since it is still used for some applications. MD3 next? See [5]. Johan Schön has been kind enough to assemble some statistics over past Pike source code distributions. In the table below you have the release version, the release date and the size of the .tar.gz-file that contained the source distribution. The current Pike 7.3 source is included as comparison. Release Date Size 0.1 1996-09-22 410829 0.2 1996-10-11 444465 0.4 1997-01-04 486576 0.5.1 1997-11-10 857565 0.6.72 1998-07-22 1232444 0.6.80 1998-07-24 1272353 0.6.85 1998-08-04 1275570 0.6.105 1998-10-28 1378900 0.6.110 1998-11-15 1528798 0.6.131 1999-05-27 1560257 7.0.36 2000-04-11 2786318 7.0.78 2000-08-04 2813777 7.2.30 2001-04-06 3853952 7.2.197 2001-09-12 4254912 7.2.239 2001-11-27 4196566 (7.3.16 2002-02-09 5650823) For those of us developing Pike applications with graphical user interfaces the good news is that GTK is now working on both Windows XP and MacOS X. The latter requires XDarwin and the GTK libraries from MacGIMP. Currently developmental versions of these can be found at [6] and [7] respectively. Please remember that these are developmental version and thus can do anything to your system. The latest stable release of pike is 7.2.239 and can be found at [8] The latest development version is 7.3.16 and the source can be found in CVS. Instructions for how do obtain the latest versions from cvs is found at [9]. Copyright (c) 2002 Mikael Brandström <mikael@brandstrom.org>. This newsletter may be distributed freely to promote Pike. Official pike website: http://pike.roxen.com/