Issue 1
0. Introduction
Please welcome the first volume of the Chicken Gazette, your weekly summary of the things around your favorite Chicken project. The Chicken Gazette will be posted on the chicken-users list and be available through many other channels (wiki, RSS feed) as well.
This summary is written by a single person only so there might be things left out, omitted or plainly misunderstood. Feel free to discuss and add corrections to each issue as you see fit.
1. New Infrastructure - Update Your Bookmarks!
As we have finally switched our infrastructure to the new server at http://www.call-cc.org the last week's wiki logs show the huge amount of cleanup work going on.
Especially Mario, Peter, Jim, and lots of others put a significant amount of work into cleaning up the wiki markup, fixing the wiki parser and making the migration more bearable for everyone. Thanks!
For those that have old svn checkouts on their systems this site may help to (svn) switch to our new servers:
http://wiki.call-cc.org/infrastructure-migration
Eggdoc documentation has been converted into wiki pages! If you come across an egg that's still undocumented, please help fixing it!
If you are an egg author and have undocumented eggs, please document them. This will help others and generally the world will be a better place :)
2. The Hatching Farm - New Eggs
Nonentheless we can welcome some new eggs that have been added during the last week:
- dbus (ported by Felix to Chicken 4)
- bindings for DBUS which is a popular IPC (inter-process communication) protocol which is often used between system components
- epoll / rooster (thanks to David Reynolds!)
- which provides an interface to the linux epoll function. Rooster is a minimal server based on epoll
- 3viewer
- a simple 3D viewer application for OpenGL graphics (thanks Felix)
3. The Core - Bleeding Edge Development
On August 24th Felix bumped the version in the experimental branch to 4.6.1 which indicates that we will have a new major release soon.
Nonetheless the experimental branch contains some interesting new features daring Chicken testers may want to try out (on their non production machines):
- applied fix for broken randomize (provided by Kon Lovett)
- profiling-decoration was applied to non-global procedures (reported by Peter Bex)
- file-copy and file-move give proper error when used on directories (thanks to Moritz Heidkamp)
- fetch call-chain in exception-handler and print that one in the REPL's error message (suggested by Christian Kellermann)
- applied Jim Ursetto's record-rename patch
Please see the NEWS file for much more complete list.
4. Chicken Talk
There are currently two mailing lists available for Chicken: chicken-users targeted at users of our practical scheme system and chicken-hackers which usually covers internal topics around chicken-core.
Chicken-users has been a bit quiet last week but Christiano Haesbert asked about nice code snippets for reading and learning pleasure. We have learned from Phil Bewig about http://programmingpraxis.com which covers scheme examples twice a week (so he says).
Arthur Maciel brought the attention to the QT egg and it seems there will be a better and enhanced version available soon.
As a "side-effect" of updating eggs a dependency of message-digest called format-compiler-base has spawned a discussion about software licenses and eggs on chicken-users. See the the whole glory here. Ideas can be added to ticket #358 in the bugtracker. The outcome has yet to be determined.
A couple of Chicken developers made it to FroSCon 2010 to set up a booth and talk to visitors about Chicken Scheme. A writeup of this event has been posted to chicken-hackers. Pictures can be found here.
If you want to join the fun, please come to Eindhoven on 6th-7th November 2010 as the Chicken Team will have a booth at T-DOSE.
Thanks to Peter and Alaric for reviewing drafts of this issue.