Release Digest: GNOME, August 21, 2002

gtktalog 1.0rc2

Application
===========

gtktalog 1.0rc2

Description
===========

GTKtalog is made to easily browse a CDROM database. Each 
disk, folder and file has a size, date, category, 
description, and content parameter and can be completely 
edited or deleted. The file search module can do searches 
on filename, foldername w

Enhancements
============

- new plugin to work with tcprobe

Fixes
=====

- bug fixed with directories
-

Download
========

http://savannah.gnu.org/download/gtktalog/
_____________________________________________

gob2 2.0.2

PFFFFFFFFT

I go to the sink and the water doesn't work.  Hmmm.  Ok I suppose it's time
for a new GOB2 release then.  Well here it is then.  Mostly fixes of things
that people found when using 2.0.1.  There are no new features though I have
some in mind so those shall be forthcoming.

So what is this gob thing?  Well besides being the cure for cancer, it also
generates GObjects (or GTK+ objects).  GOB2 is a replacement for the version
1 GOB, that was for GTK+ 1.x mostly.  GOB2 can handle pretty much most of
the GObject features.  At least most of the ones that anyone will ever use.
It only requires GLib 2.0 and can generate arbitrary GObjects.  You can have
both versions installed at the same time if you wish, so that you don't have
to port all your gob files to gob2 for now, but you really should as gob2 is
nicer and all that kind of stuff.

Here are the news in 2.0.2 (gob2):

        * Properly link BOXED type
        * unref/unrefwith works now since shtdown changed into dispose
        * Update documentation
        * man page escapes all ' chars (fix debian bug 155577)
        * Further tests in test.gob

ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gob/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gob/RPMS/ (rpms not yet available for 2.0.2)
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.0.1/sources/gob2/
http://www.5z.com/jirka/gob.html

Have fun,

George

-- 
George 
   Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, 
   but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
                       -- Winston Churchill
_____________________________________________

Pango-1.1.1

Pango-1.1.1 is now available for download at:

 ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.0/

This is a development release leading up to Pango-1.2; no further
API additions are anticipated before Pango-1.2, but there is no
guarantee of stability at this point. This package is ABI and API
compatible with the public API in Pango-1.0.x.

Major changes as compared to Pango 1.0 are:

 - The Xft and FT2 backends are now based on the fontconfig
   library, available from http://keithp.com/fonts/.
   This provides considerably improved font matching
   capabilities and performance enhancements.

 - The Xft backend now requires version 2 of Xft, also
   available from http://keithp.com/fonts/. One of the
   benefits of Xft2 is the ability to render antialiased
   fonts without the RENDER extension.

 - A Hangul shaper for Xft by Changwoo Ryu
 
 - A shaper for Indic OpenType fonts based on code from
   ICU, done by Eric Mader.

[ What happened to 1.1.1? I just never got around to
  releasing it ]


About Pango
===========

Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an emphasis
on internationalization. Pango can be used anywhere that text layout
is needed; however, most of the work on Pango-1.0 was done using the
GTK+ widget toolkit as a test platform. Pango forms the core of text
and font handling for GTK+-2.0.

Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout can be used
with four different font backends:

 - Core X windowing system fonts
 - Client-side fonts on X using the Xft library
 - Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType library
 - Native fonts on Microsoft backends

Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for particular
combinations of script and font backend. Pango-1.0.0 ships with a wide
selection of modules, including modules for Hebrew, Arabic, Hangul, 
Thai, and a number of Indic scripts. Virtually all of the world's major 
scripts are supported.

As well as the low level layout rendering routines, Pango includes
PangoLayout, a high level driver for laying out entire blocks of text,
and routines to assist in editing internationalized text.

More information about Pango is available from http://www.pango.org/.

Pango depends on version 2.0.0 of the GLib library; more information
about GLib can be found at http://www.gtk.org/.


Changes between 1.1.0 and 1.1.1
===============================

* Merge a lot of the code between the Xft and FT2 backend,
  so that the FT2 backend gets the recent improvements to Xft.
* Add proper language tag support to the Xft/FT2 backends.
* Various effienciency fixes for the Xft/FT2 backends.

Changes between 1.0.x and 1.1.0
===============================

* Support for version 2 of the Xft library. [Keith Packard]
* Convert the freetype backend over to using fontconfig,
  instead of MiniXft for font cataloging.
* A port of the Indic OpenType code from ICU to Pango. [Eric Mader]
* A new hangul-xft [Changwoo Ryu]
* Bug-fixes to the OpenType handling code.
* Various cleanups to the PangoXft and PangoFT2 public APIs.
* Docs switched over to DocBook XML. [Matthias Clasen]

Owen Taylor
20 August 2002
_____________________________________________

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 1.0

The GNOME Usability Project is proud to announce the release of the
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (v1.0), the product of usability
engineers, designers, hackers, and Irish wine. The guidelines deliver
both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements, as
well as the philosophy and general principles behind the guidelines.

The Human Interface Guidelines may be browsed online or downloaded from:

    http://usability.gnome.org/hig

As the most complete and carefully researched[1] document of its kind in
the Free Software community, the guidelines are a major step toward the
creation of an easy to use and powerful set of free applications with a
distinctive and coherent style. While they are targeted toward the
development of GNOME applications, little of the content is library or
toolkit specific. Thus we hope that projects unaffiliated with the GNOME
desktop will find these guidelines useful too, and will consider
following them wherever applicable (reaping our usability experience and
the many hours that have gone into the research, production and revision
of the guidelines). 

Further, we would like to challenge the KDE project to serve the general
user community by partnering with us in developing these guidelines to
create a common Free Software interface style. Most users avail of a mix
of applications from both desktops and other sources, whatever their
particular choice of environment. Everyone wins when we make this
natural and convenient. We call on the members of the KDE project to
rise above Not Invented Here (a natural tendency that few people, much
less large projects, successfully repress, we know) in taking a major
step for the good of both our user bases and the long term success of
Free Software.

Finally, while we feel it is very useful in its current state this
document has a long way to go, and we know it. As an initial public
release, we expect there to be many typographical and grammatical errors
and perhaps a few major problems too. Please send any feedback to
hig@gnome.org, or file a bug at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=HIG. Now that the first
major revision is out, you can expect to enjoy (ha ha) new releases of
the guidelines every month or so containing additional sections and
fixes to existing sections. If you would like to see a topic covered
that isn't currently in the HIG, please do mail us!

-Seth Nickell (on behalf of the HIG team)

[1] We have drawn upon the success or failure of design aspects from
many environments including GNOME itself, KDE, Mac OS, Java, and
Windows, as well as our own observations. We are indebted to those
environments and their respective style guides, as well as the countless
people who have allowed us to observe them, or served as subjects in
usability tests.

_____________________________________________

GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.0-pre1

Hello, everybody!

It has been almost a year since the release of version 4.5.55 of GNU
Midnight Commander.  It was the intention of the developers at that time
to focus on stability and release the next version shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, the task of making GNU Midnight Commander do what it has
always been supposed to do turned out to be a hard and time consuming
task.  This program has a heavy baggage of hacks, badly conceived
features and unfinished code.  On the other hand, very few contributors
were interested in fixing the code - they were mostly suggesting new
features.

To make the things worse, serious security issues have been discovered
in the part on GNU Midnight Commander called VFS (Virtual Filesystem). 
In several instances, the data from remote servers was copied to the
local buffers without proper bounds checking.

The discovery and the subsequent fixing of those issues makes it
necessary to make another release without delay.  Considering the fact
that almost all changes since the 4.5.55 release have been bugfixes
(some of them possibly security related) or trivial changes, it has
been decided that the fixed version should be released from the main
branch.  Fixing only the most notorious bugs in 4.5.55 would be
insufficient.

Unfortunately, the current code has known problems that the development
team would prefer to fix before we can call the release version 4.6.0. 
Those problems are not regressions - they existed in 4.5.55 as well. 

That's why this document is an announcement of version 4.6.0-pre1 of GNU
Midnight Commander.  It's a prerelease that needs more testing to become
a release.


This is a terse list of the user-visible changes between 4.5.55 and
4.6.0-pre1:

- - Security.
        - Fixes for remotely exploitable buffer overflows in VFS.

- - Ports and editions.
        - GNOME edition has been removed.
        - OS/2 port has been removed.
        - MAD (Memory Allocation Debugger) has been removed.

- - Core functionality.
        - Large file support enabled by default.
        - Shift-F5 and Shift-F6 copy and rename like F5 and F6, but
          suggest the selected filename as the destination.
        - File search with contents doesn't use external egrep.
        - Directories with many files are now reloaded much faster.
        - Subshell works under Cygwin.

- - Screen libraries.
        - Improved support for ncurses.
        - Dropped support for the old Curses library.
        - Colors are enabled on all capable terminals when using S-Lang.
        - Syntax highlighting now works with ncurses.

- - Editor.
        - Editor files are now stored in ~/.mc/cedit instead of ~/.cedit
          to avoid collision with Cooledit.
        - New syntax rules - PHP, Tcl, SQL, DOS batch file.
        - Editor supports word completion.

- - VFS.
        - Local temporary file is used for uploading via ftpfs/fish only
          if file is uploaded to the same ftp/fish server.
        - mcfs support is disabled by default.
        - Samba configuration and codepage files locations can be
          configured.
        - .netrc support in ftpfs is enabled by default.

- - Documentation.
        - Added manuals in Spanish, Italian and Russian.
        - Help files are not distributed, but generated during the
          build from the manual pages.


Simple rules to decide whether you should upgrade:

- - If you are tired of bugs in the older versions, you should upgrade.
- - If you want to contribute code, you should upgrade.
- - If you are concerned about security, you should upgrade.
- - If you are really concerned about security, you should not be using
  GNU Midnight Commander, because it wasn't designed to be secure.
- - If it's hard for you to upgrade or you don't really care, then wait
  for 4.6.0 release - it will be more stable.

What needs to be done before the 4.6.0 release and how you can help:

- - Security audit.  GNU Midnight Commander can open files from untrusted
sources and connect to untrusted servers.  Being a popular program among
system administrators, it really needs a good audit.

- - Portability issues.  Make sure that GNU Midnight Commander works on
your operating system.

- - Bug fixes.  It's hardly possible to make it bug free, but tell us what
annoys you - it may be easy to fix before the next release, or it may be
added to the TODO list for the future versions.

- - Internationalization.  Update translations for your language.  Now
it's easy to add new translated manuals, and those manuals are converted
to the help files automatically.


How to contact developers of GNU Midnight Commander:

Website: http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/
Mailing list for developers: mc-devel@gnome.org
Mailing list for users: mc@gnome.org

Please always mention the version of GNU Midnight Commander you are
using when sending any e-mail to those mailing lists.


Regards,
Pavel Roskin

_____________________________________________

gedit 2.0.3

Application
===========

gedit 2.0.3 (for GNOME 2.0)


Description
===========

Small and lightweight UTF-8 text editor for the GNOME environment.
It supports most standard editing features, plus several not found in your
average text editor (plugins being the most notable of these). 
Complete GNOME integration is featured.


Fixes
=====

- Fixed the gedit.desktop.in/ file (Paolo Maggi)
- Removed a couple of memory leaks (Paolo)
- Updated documentation (Irene Ryan)
- Fixed OMF file (Mikael Hallendal)
- Fixed session management related problems (Federico Mena Quintero)
- Fixed some accessibility related problems (Federico)
- Fixed the diff plugin (Paolo)


Updated Translations
====================

- Brazilian Portuguese (Gustavo Noronha Silva)
- Bulgarian (Yanko Kaneti)
- Catalan (Jordi Mallach)
- Czech (Michal Bukovjan)
- Danish (Ole Laursen)
- Dutch (Taco Witte)
- Estonian (Tõivo Leedjärv)
- Finnish (Jarkko Ranta)
- German (Jan Arne Petersen, Christian Meyer, Manuel Borchers, Christian
Neumair)
- Hungarian (Andras Timar)
- Japanese (Akira TAGOH)
- Korean (Young-Ho Cha)
- Latvian (Peteris Krisjanis)
- Malay (Hasbullah Bin Pit)
- Norwegian (Kjartan Maraas)
- Polish (GNOME PL Team)
- Portuguese (Duarte Loreto )
- Russian (Dmitry G. Mastrukov)
- Swedish (Christian Rose)
- Turkish (Fatih Demir)
- Vietnamese (Pablo Saratxaga)


Download
========

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.0.1/sources/gedit/gedit-2.0.3.tar.gz