---

Release Digest: GNU, October 6, 2004

Guile 1.6.5

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new Guile
release. This is the next maintenance release for the 1.6 stable
series.

You can find it here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.6.5.tar.gz.

Guile is Project GNU’s extension language library, an
interpreter for Scheme, packaged as a library that you can link
into your applications to give them their own scripting language.
Guile should eventually support other languages as well, giving
users of Guile-based applications a choice of languages.

This is primarily a bugfix release. Highlights include:

  • Various architecture (and compiler optimization) related bugs
    have been fixed: these changes should improve the situation on at
    least ia64, arm, m68k, alpha, and powerpc.
  • SRFI-31 has been added (special form `rec’ for recursive
    evaluation). Try (use-modules (srfi srfi-31)).
  • SRFI-39 has been added (parameter objects)
  • SRFI-19 has been fixed: date-week-number now correctly respects
    the requested day of week starting the week.
  • SRFI-4 has been overhauled. Bugs have been fixed, and
    performance may be improved in certain situations. Among other
    things, large values in 64-bit homogeneous vectors should print
    correctly now.
  • In the srfi-1 module’s delete and delete! functions, the order
    of the arguments to the “=” procedure now matches the SRFI-1
    specification.
  • Bugs have been fixed that prevented the (re)generation of
    psyntax.pp.
  • The use of scm_must_realloc() for memory which is scanned by GC
    could trigger a GC scan of a free()d block of memory. This has been
    fixed.
  • array-map! and array-map-in-order! now require at least one
    source array. Previously a call without any source arrays like
    (array-map! array proc) would cause a segfault. Now such calls are
    properly rejected.
  • gethost no longer causes an exception when trying to throw an
    exception.
  • call-with-output-string won’t segv on a closed port. Now an
    exception is raised.
  • open-pipe, open-input-pipe and open-output-pipe used to leave
    an extra copy of their pipe file descriptor in the child, which was
    normally harmless, but could prevent the parent seeing eof or a
    broken pipe immediately. This has been fixed.
  • Properties set with set-source-properties! can now be read back
    correctly with source-properties.
  • Guile is now compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing when gcc is
    detected.
  • The –enable-htmldoc option has been removed from ‘configure’,
    because support for translating the documentation into HTML is now
    always provided. Use ‘make html’.

The Guile WWW page is located at

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

It contains a link to the Guile FAQ and pointers to the mailing
lists, among other things.

Any bugs found in this release will be addressed by further
bugfix releases numbered 1.6.*. The next stable Guile release with
significant functional improvements will be version 1.8.0.

In between 1.6.x and 1.8.x, you can follow Guile development in
CVS and in the Guile mailing lists (see ANON-CVS and HACKING).
Guile builds from the development branch of CVS will have version
number 1.7.0.

Guile versions with an odd middle number, i.e. 1.5.* are
unstable development versions. Even middle numbers indicate stable
versions. This has been the case since the 1.3.* series.

Please send bug reports to bug-guile@gnu.org.


Rob Browning


GIMP 2.1.6

Hi,

a new development snapshot of GIMP 2.1 is now available from ftp
ftp.gimp.org and it’s
mirrors:

http://gimp.org/downloads/#mirrors

Actually we wanted to have the first pre-release for 2.2 out by
now but there are still a couple of minor API and UI changes that
need to be done. So this is another development snapshot on the
road to GIMP 2.2. Hopefully the next release will be called
2.2-pre1 then.

This also means that we need to freeze the UI, translatable
strings and the APIs very soon now. So if you have any patches
pending, make sure you tell us about it. We will soon have to
reject further changes for 2.2. I still hope that we will at least
be very close to the 2.2 release by the end of this month.

Please note that you cannot install gimp-2.1 side-by-side with
gimp-2.0 into the same prefix. A number of files will clash, so
please use a separate prefix to install this development version!
For details, please read the file INSTALL.

Here’s an overview of the changes since 2.1.6 was released:

Overview of Changes in GIMP 2.1.6

  • Added more drawable previews (Color Exchange, DOG, Deinterlace,
    Engrave, Oilify, Ripple, Shift).
  • Added new preview widget that shows a scaled view of the full
    drawable. Use it for Apply Lens, Blinds, Channel Mixer, Destripe,
    Emboss, Illusion, Map Color, Max RGB, Plasma, Polar, Solid Noise,
    Supernova, Whirl and Pinch.
  • Added “Open as Layer” functionality to the menus.
  • Implemented the recent-file-spec for shared storage of a list
    of recently used files (really URIs).
  • Cleaned up plug-in procedure handling. Added the possibility to
    let plug-ins and scripts run using a private GimpContext.
  • Added multi-line text entries for Script-Fu and
    Gimp-Python.
  • Cleaned up PDB API for brushes, gradients, palettes and
    patterns. Deprecated lots of functions and added saner
    replacements. Added gimp-context-* PDB namespace with replacements
    for some of the deprecated stuff.
  • Let GimpView handle pixbuf previews. Added a (themable) drop
    shadow to image-file previews.
  • Cleaned up the dbbrowser and plugindetails code and GUI and
    factored out common code. Renamed both executables and menu
    entries.
  • Made tools cancelable with <Escape>.
  • Let GimpDialog add a help button to give easier access to the
    help pages.

Contributors:

Michael Natterer, Sven Neumann, David Odin, Maurits Rijk, Dave
Neary, Manish Singh, Robert Oegren, Kevin Cozens, Kevin Turner, Dov
Grobgeld, Joao S. O. Bueno, Michael Schumacher, Jonathan Levi,
Daniel Egger

Happy GIMPing

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends, & analysis