[Chicken-users] Chicken Gazette - Issue 1

[Christian Kellermann]

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--[ Issue  1 ]------------------------------------- G A Z E T T E
                               brought to you by the Chicken Team

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)
* profiling-decoration was applied to non-global procedures (reported
  by sjamaan)
* file-copy and file-move give proper error when used on directories
  (thanks to syn)
* fetch call-chain in exception-handler and print that one in the
  REPL's error message (suggested by Commander Keen)
* applied zbigniew's record-rename patch (finally), added test-case

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
http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg01194.html
for the whole glory. 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
http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg01213.html

Pictures can be found here
http://www.call-cc.org/pictures/froscon-2010/

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 (
http://t-dose.org ).

Thanks for Peter and Alaric for reviewing drafts of this issue.
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