[3144] in BarnOwl Developers
New barnowl-beta build (1.8dev)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David A Benjamin)
Sun Jul 17 21:21:52 2011
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:21:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: David A Benjamin <davidben@MIT.EDU>
To: barnowl-dev@mit.edu
Hi all,
After much procrastinating and shaving of Solaris yaks, there's finally
barnowl-beta build leading up to version 1.8! This release has seen a lot
of code churn as we slowly update some of BarnOwl's core code. To that
end, we have some new dependencies (and dropped a couple) in the new
release, notably the perl GLib bindings and a slightly newer version of
GLib.
Because we pushed the GLib version up, Debian etch has been desupported.
If there is continued demand, we can investigate bundling a newer one into
the locker as we do for the Solaris and Athena 9 builds. For now, the
latest release there is still 1.7.1.
I encourage you to test this build by running 'barnowl-beta' from the
barnowl locker.
Some changes in the new build, in no particular order, include:
* Text saved to the kill buffer with C-k now persists globally among
all edit windows.
* Various cross-realm fixes, notably fields on cross-realm outgoing
messages are set correctly.
* The default style now decorates unauthenticated zephyrgrams with the
string 'UNAUTH:'.
* Non-CC'd personals with multiple recipients now generate multiple
outgoing messages in the message list, thanks to new developer DD
Liu.
* Zephyr variables 'exposure' and 'default_exposure' have been added
to manipulate zephyr visibility.
* Using more than 256 foreground/background color pairs in 256-color
mode no longer causes drawing artifacts on builds against ncurses
without ext-color. Note: this bug still occurs on builds against
ncurses with ext-color enabled (i386_rhel4 and sun4x_510) due to a
BarnOwl bug and a different ncurses bug. The build and bundled
ncurses library will be updated when that's resolved.
* The sepbar now shows how far you are in a truncated message.
* Our custom event loop has been replaced with the standard GMainLoop
used throughout the Linux desktop stack. This buys us better
interoperability with event-processing third-party code, some
thread-safety, and an event loop we don't have to write ourselves.
* BarnOwl now enables AnyEvent's existing bridge to the Glib event
loop. This bridge (and thus the vast body of AnyEvent-based code on
CPAN) are now available to all perl modules. The existing timer and
io-dispatch APIs now backend onto AnyEvent.
* The IRC module has been ported to AnyEvent::IRC which, among other
things, is not abandoned. The new module also fixes the
long-standing reconnect bug.
* Logging is now delegated to a background thread. This should greatly
improve responsiveness, especially for those on an AFS home
directory.
* A new delete-and-expunge command (delx for short) has been added for
perl modules that wish to remove a message.
* Numerous bugfixes and cleanups, and anything I might have missed.
Development should continue as normal on the 'master' branch. There's
probably not much use in branching a release-1.8 yet. I don't think we
need this to be a feature freeze or anything complicated like that.
David
