GNUstep Weekly Editorial 03-06-2002

[dennis]

   As you all might have noticed I send in the old editorial. This is the
   correct one.
   
                             Editorial 1 June 2002
                                       
   This editorial took some time, due to a lack of time. After the day is
   over there is still work left. Hope to do better next week.
   
Mailing lists

   Adam uploaded a new version of gnustep-examples to
   ftp://ftp.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/core Among other things it includes
   a nice new program to display fractal paterns, written by Marko Riedel
   
   Zoltan mentioned a new release of the gslib backend. Updates available
   from: http://goliat.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/gnustep/
   
Code changes

   As might be expected with a long pause between editorials, there are a
   lot of changes. I will try to summon them for you:
   
   gnustep-base: Richard Frith-Macdonald did some consistency updates on
   GSXML and friends. He also implemented memory mangement so that the
   underlying libxml data is not freed unless all objects derived from it
   have been deallocated. He added a GSMimeHeader to GSMime. And the a
   quote from the ChangeLog:
Applied patches by James Knight, to improve memory efficiency and
insertion.deletion speed to hash and map tables.  Also fixes for
some GC problems.
Fixed minor problem in patch, and added code to call functions to
clean up after hash and map enumerations.  Modified cleanup function
to clear enumerator ... for memory release on GC system.
Rewrote enumeration code so that it maintains the characteristic
that objects can safely be removed from maps after being enumerated
(this feature is used in several places).
*WARNING* This introduces a binary incompatibility in that the size
of the map table and hash table enumeration types has grown.
If you have binaries which use the NSEnumerateHashTable() or the
NSEnumeratemapTable() functions, you need to rebuild them.

   gnustep-gui: Changes by Nicola Pero and Georg Fleischmann which tidy
   up the code. And Alexander Malmberg added color picker bundles: the
   wheel color picker and the standard rgb/hsb/cmyk/gray picker.
   
   gnustep-back: Fred Kiefer reimplemented creation of bitmaps. This
   should now work for all bitmaps with >16 bits per pixel. The bitmaps
   that are still missing are due to clipping problems, as can be seen by
   switching clipping off in the winlib backend.
   
   GSWeb: Manuel Guesdon added a lot of changes which are too much to
   mention.
   
   StepTalk: Stefan Urbanek commited new StepTalk example 'StepTalk
   Shell' to the CVS repository.
   
Official GNUstep releases

   This section mentions the this week released versions of the official
   GNUstep parts.
     * GWorkspace 0.3.5
     * GNUMail.app 1.0.2
     * Pantomime 1.0.4
     * ProjectCenter 0.3.0
       
   Happy Stepping,
   Dennis Leeuw