[4479] in linux-announce channel archive
Linux-Announce Digest #771
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Digestifier)
Sun May 16 14:13:11 2004
From: Digestifier <Linux-Announce-Request@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>
To: Linux-Announce@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu
Reply-To: Linux-Announce@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu
Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 14:13:07 EDT
Linux-Announce Digest #771, Volume #4 Sun, 16 May 2004 14:13:07 EDT
Contents:
[ANN] tconfpy 1.185 Released And Available (Tim Daneliuk)
From FSF Europe ("Frederick Noronha (FN)")
TuxMobil: more than 2.000 laptop installation reports (Werner Heuser)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 May 2004 18:12:46 CST
From: Tim Daneliuk <tundra@tundraware.com>
Reply-To: tundra@tundraware.com
Subject: [ANN] tconfpy 1.185 Released And Available
'tconfpy' Version 1.185 is now released and available for download at:
http://www.tundraware.com/Software/tconfpy
The last public release was 1.184 (4-27-2004)
This release fixes a bug that incorrectly reported syntax errors
within literal blocks found inside False conditionals. The bug
was benign but noisy, so a new release was dropped to fix it.
Complete details can be found in the WHATSNEW.txt file included in the
distribution.
Users are strongly encouraged to join the tconfpy-users mailing list as
described in the documentation.
What Is 'tconfpy'?
==================
'tconfpy' is an advanced configuration file parser and validator for
Python programs. By using 'tconfpy', Python programmers can provide
their users with an external configuration file for setting program
options, defining defaults, and so on. 'tconfpy' offloads the
responsibility for parsing and validating a configuration file from
the main application. The Python programmer need only deal
with the results and any errors or warnings generated during the
parsing process.
'tconfpy' recognizes a rich configuration language and provides a
number of sophisticated programming features including:
- The ability to breakup large configurations into smaller pieces
via the '.include' directive.
- Support for string substitution and concatenation throughout the
configuration file via string variables. Variables may be
locally declared, a reference to a symbol already in the
symbol table, or a reference to an environment variable.
- A complete set of conditional directives for selective
processing of configuration options. Both existential ("If
variable exists ...") and comparison ("if string equals/does not
equal string ...") forms are provided, as is an '.else'
directive.
- The ability to instantiate program options prior to reading a
configuration file and make them mandatory by declaring those
options as Read-Only.
- Optional type validation to ensure that a user enters a value
appropriate for boolean, integer, floating point, string, or
complex data.
- Optional value validation to ensure that a configuration option
is either within a specified range or one of an enumerated set
of possible values. For configuration options which are string
types, 'tconfpy', can optionally specify min/max string lengths
and enumerate a set of legitimate regular expressions that the
string must match.
- The ability to define an arbitrary number of lexical namespaces.
- The ability to use the various features of 'tconfpy' as a pre-
processor for any other text (including source code for other
programming languages and Python itself) via the '.literal'
directive.
- The ability to "template" classes of variables, thereby predefining
the type and value restrictions for such variables. This makes
'tconfpy' useful as a building block for data validation tools.
- An optional debug capability which returns detailed information
about each line parsed.
- Includes a test driver program for learning how to program with
'tconfpy' and for debugging and testing your own configuration
files.
- Comes with approximately 40 pages of documentation including a
Programmer's API Reference and a User's Guide to the 'tconfpy'
configuration language. Documentation is provided in several
formats including Unix 'man', Plain Text, html, pdf, and
Postscript.
'tconfpy' is a Pure Python module and is platform-independent.
It should work identically on any platform on which Python runs.
==============================================================================
Tim Daneliuk
tundra@tundraware.com
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------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 06:18:36 CST
From: "Frederick Noronha (FN)" <fred@bytesforall.org>
Subject: From FSF Europe
>From press@fsfeurope.org Sun May 16 04:05:18 2004
Essen/Hamburg
May 14th, 2004
FSFE welcomes German government on its way towards
a clear position in the discussion around software patents
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) "welcomes the commitment
of the Federal Government of Germany to freedom from software patents
as being of extreme importance for innovation in Europe", Georg
Greve, president of FSFE, comments in a press release. "Clearly the
opinion of the Federal Government regarding the information society
is shifting towards a position which is clear and close to the
position of its citizens. The FSFE will support the German government
on this journey to its utmost."
The ongoing learning process is particularly notable to the FSFE,
because for a long time during the preparatory deliberations of the
working group of the Council of Ministers, the Federal Republic
belonged to the hawks.
These hawks wanted, for example, so-called "requirements of program"
to be accepted. If these were to be introduced, a patent would be
infringed by the mere existence of a program, not just by its
commercialisation.
"This would threaten all people who develop software -- whether the
software is intended for use in study, leisure or business -- exactly
what the patent industry wants", explains Greve, and points out that,
"it is contradictory to use Free Software in so many public
institutions on the one hand and to threaten them with software
patents on the other hand."
The patent supporters want to monopolize interfaces and file formats.
The consequence of this would be that import and export features and
even simple printing features might be offered by the holder of the
monopoly only.
With this shift in direction, the suggestions the FSFE has been
making for years are starting to pay off. A number of administration
officials understand software patents to be a serious thread to the
information society; now the Ministry of Justice seems to subscribe
to this view as well.
Last Wednesday Elmar Hucko, head of a government department in the
Ministry of Justice, announced at an event in Berlin that the Federal
Government would vote against the controversial software patent
directive of the Council of Ministers of the European Union. At the
same time, according to the online magazine "heise.de", Hucko
criticised the current practice in the European Patent Office (EPO)
of granting patents in the field of "computer-implemented
inventions". "Not all of these these patents should have been
granted," he emphasised.
"After this we are confident that even the Ministry of Justice will
accept sooner or later that software can be patentable under no
circumstances -- not even when it is supposed to control machines,"
says the FSFE in a press release.
In Greve's opinion, the Federal Government should, given its change
in stance, now argue against the other members of the EC, "in order
to avoid a wrong decision". It should then convince its colleagues to
exclude software patents for the future.
Then it might be possible to offer a draft directive to the European
Parliament by the end of the year, "benefiting freedom and ensuring
continued innovation and growth" which restrains the patent industry
from bludgeoning software companies.
About the Free Software Foundation Europe
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable
non-governmental organization dedicated to all aspects of Free
Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate
in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and
redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition
- allow equal participation in the information age. Creating
awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and
legally, and giving people freedom by supporting development of Free
Software are central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in
2001 as the European sister organization of the Free Software
Foundation in the United States.
http://fsfeurope.org
Contact
Europe:
Georg C. F. Greve <greve@fsfeurope.org>
phone: +49-40-23809080
fax: +49-40-23809081
Further contact information available at
http://fsfeurope.org/contact/
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_______________________________________________
Press-release mailing list
Press-release@fsfeurope.org
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release
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------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 13:05:35 CST
From: Werner Heuser <wehe@tuxmobil.org>
Subject: TuxMobil: more than 2.000 laptop installation reports
Today TuxMobil has got the submission of the 2.000
Linux laptop and notebook installation report[1]. Additionally
there are 158 Linux PDA reports[2], 110 Linux mobile cell phone
reports[3] and compatibility hints for 498 PCMCIA and CardBus
cards[4] available. I didn't count Linux information for
IrDA devices[5] and digital portable music players[6] yet. Besides
Linux-on-Laptops[7] the TuxMobil project is one the most
wellknown projects dedicated to Linux on mobile computers.
[1] http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html
[2] http://tuxmobil.org/pda_linux.html
[3] http://tuxmobil.org/phones_linux.html
[4] http://tuxmobil.org/pcmcia_linux.html
[5] http://tuxmobil.org/ir_misc.html
[6] http://tuxmobil.org/portable_players.html
[7] http://www.linux-on-laptops.com
--
|=| Werner Heuser = Berliner Str. 122 = D-13187 Berlin = Germany
|=| <wehe at tuxmobil.org> T. 0049 - (0)30 - 349 53 86
|=| http://TuxMobil.org UniX on Mobile Systems: HOWTOs,Software
|*| This is no time for phony rhetoric -- Lou Reed
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------------------------------
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