Planet GNU

FSF Events: Por una sociedad digital libre

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:21:37 +0000

Las actividades cuyo objetivo es la "inclusión" de más personas en el empleo de las tecnologías digitales se basan en la suposición de que ésto sea invariablemente algo bueno. Parecería que así es, si se juzga considerando únicamente la conveniencia práctica inmediata. Sin embargo, si juzgamos también en términos de derechos humanos, es el tipo de mundo digital en el que nos quieren insertar lo que determina si se trata de un bien o de un mal. Antes de luchar por la inclusión digital, debemos cerciorarnos de que las personas estarán en un mundo digital bueno.

Favor de rellenar este formulario, para que podamos contactarle acerca de eventos futuros en la región madrileña.

FSF Events: Copyright vs. Community

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:20:41 +0000

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Braga.

Paolo Carlini: C++11 tidbits: Non-static Data Member Initializers

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:03:16 +0000

Hi!

starting this month, thanks also to Chris (Jones) help and encouragement, I'm posting here the "C++11 tidbits" which I usually contribute to the Tools group Linux & VM partner newsletter. Enjoy! ;)

Despite the long name, Non-static Data Member Initializers are a rather straightforward new feature. In fact the GCC Bugzilla reveals novice C++ users often tried to use it in C++98, when the syntax was illegal! It must be said that the same feature is also available in Java, so adding it to C++ makes life easier for people using both languages.

The GCC implementation is brand new. It will be available soon in gcc-4.7.0 but it seems already quite stable and ready to play with.

People looking for self-contained specifications, outside the Standard itself, may consider fetching paper N2756 (and its earlier versions) from the ISO web site for more rationale.

In a nutshell, in C++11 the following are both legal:

  struct A
  {
    int m;
    A() : m(7) { }
  };

  struct B
  {
    int m = 7;   // non-static data member initializer
  };

thus the code:

  A a;
  B b;

  std::cout << a.m << '\n';
  std::cout << b.m << std::endl;

prints '7' followed by '7', because both the 'm' member of 'a' and the 'm' member of 'b' are initialized to 7.

A non-static data member initializer can be always overridden, thus:

  struct C
  {
    int m = 7;
    C() : m(14) { }
  };

  C c;

  std::cout << c.m << std::endl;

prints '14', not '7'.

This is actually very useful in practice, because it allows concisely written classes with many constructors, most relying on non-static initializers while default values are overridden for a few, selected data members. For interesting examples see the ISO papers.

In the examples we have been using built-in integer types, but the feature works with any kind of data member, for example std::string, std::vector, or any user-defined type. It also integrates nicely with other C++11 features like initializer lists. For example, the following is perfectly legal:

  struct D
  {
    std::vector<int> m{4, 5, 6};
  };

The code:

  D d;

  std::cout << d.m[0] << '\n';
  std::cout << d.m[1] << '\n';
  std::cout << d.m[2] << std::endl;

then prints '4', '5', and '6', on separate lines.

More non-trivial examples are available in the GCC test suite under g++.dg/cpp0x/nsdmi* and also in the C++ runtime library internals where the new construct is already exploited for the implementation of <mutex>. See, for example, once_flag, __mutex_base, and <condition_variable>.

As for all the other new C++ features, please don't hesitate to report bugs!

Aleksander Morgado: FOSDEM talk slides online

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:28:07 +0000

The slides of my talk about LTE and ModemManager in FOSDEM are now online at the Lanedo articles website:

LTE is here and ModemManager is (almost) ready for it

Filed under: GNU Planet, Lanedo Planet, Meetings, Planets Tagged: FOSDEM, LTE, ModemManager, slides

Sylvain Beucler: Make sure glue isn't stripped

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:38:48 +0000

If you ever get this cryptic error when loading an Android native app:

FATAL EXCEPTION: main
java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{org.wikibooks.OpenGL/android.app.NativeActivity}: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to load native library: /data/data/org.wikibooks.OpenGL/lib/libnative-activity.so
       at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1768)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1784)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1500(ActivityThread.java:123)
       at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:939)
       at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
       at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:130)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3835)
       at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
       at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507)
       at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:847)
       at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:605)
       at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to load native library: /data/data/org.wikibooks.OpenGL/lib/libnative-activity.so
       at android.app.NativeActivity.onCreate(NativeActivity.java:199)
       at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1047)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1722)
       ... 11 more

This may mean that Java couldn't find the ANativeActivity_onCreate function in your code, because it was stripped by the compiler.

If you use the native_app_glue NDK module, you may have noticed this strange code:

    // Make sure glue isn't stripped.
    app_dummy();

Let's experiment what happens with and without this line:

Calling app_dummy:

$ arm-linux-androideabi-objdump -T libs/armeabi/libnative-activity.so  | grep ANativeActivity_onCreate
000067fc g    DF .text  000000f8 ANativeActivity_onCreate

Not calling app_dummy :

$ arm-linux-androideabi-objdump -T libs/armeabi/libnative-activity.so | grep ANativeActivity_onCreate
$   # nothing

native_app_glue mainly defines Android callbacks. Since none of them are called directly by your code, the compiler strips the android_native_app_glue.o module entirely. If you use app_dummy however, it embeds it. Fortunately the compiler cannot strip the module on a per-function basis

That's why you need to call app_dummy when using the native_app_glue NDK module.

This looks like a ugly work-around though - isn't there a cleaner way?

FSF News: Nominations are open for the 14th annual Free Software Awards

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:09:00 +0000

Award for the Advancement of Free Software

The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually by FSF president Richard Stallman to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Last year, Rob Savoye was recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to compiler and testing tools, and his leadership of the GNU Gnash project, a fully-free replacement for Adobe Flash. Savoye joined a prestigious list of previous winners including John Gilmore, Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Ted Ts'o, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Alan Cox, Larry Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza and Larry Wall.

Award for Projects of Social Benefit

Nominations are also open for the 2011 Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

This award is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.

We look to recognize projects or teams that encourage collaboration to accomplish social tasks. A long-term commitment to one's project (or the potential for a long-term commitment) is crucial to this end.

This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity. We have deliberately chosen this broad criterion so that many different areas of activity can be considered. However, one area that is not included is that of free software itself. Projects with a primary goal of promoting or advancing free software are not eligible for this award (we honor those projects with our annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software).

We will consider any project or team that uses free software or its philosophy to address a goal important to society. To qualify, a project must use free software, produce free documentation, or use the idea of free software as defined in the Free Software Definition. Work done commercially is eligible, but we will give this award to the project or team that best utilizes resources for society's greater benefit.

Last year, The Tor Project received this award, in recognition of its work to fight against surveillance inflicted by increasingly restrictive governments and to improve the safety and wellbeing of all Internet citizens.

Previous winners have included the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Groklaw, the Sahana project, and Wikipedia.

Eligibility

In the case of both awards, previous winners are not eligible for nomination, but renomination of other previous nominees is encouraged. Only individuals are eligible for nomination for the Advancement of Free Software Award (not projects), and only projects can be nominated for the Social Benefit Award (not individuals).

The award committee has not been finalized, but is made up of previous winners, free software activists and FSF president, Richard Stallman.

Please send your nominations to award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before Monday, November 7th, 2011. Please submit nominations in the following format:

In the email message subject line, either put the name of the person you are nominating for the Award for Advancement of Free Software, or put the name of the project for the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.
Please include, in the body of your message, an explanation (40 lines or less) of the work done and why you think it is especially important to the advancement of software freedom or how it benefits society, respectively.
Please state, in the body of your message, where to find the materials (e.g., software, manuals, or writing) which your nomination is based on.

Information about the previous awards can be found at http://www.fsf.org/awards. Winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony at the LibrePlanet conference tentatively scheduled for March 2012, in Boston, Massachusetts.

FSF Events: For a Free Digital Society

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:17:30 +0000

Activities directed at ``including'' more people in the use of digital technology are predicated on the assumption that such inclusion is invariably a good thing. It appears so, when judged solely by immediate practical convenience. However, if we also judge in terms of human rights, whether digital inclusion is good or bad depends on what kind of digital world we are to be included in. If we wish to work towards digital inclusion as a goal, it behooves us to make sure it is the good kind.

The speech is public and all are encouraged to attend.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Avignon.

FSF Events: Rencontre avec Jean Pierre Berlan (agronome et économiste) et Richard Stallman

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:07:31 +0000

Veuillez remplir notre formulaire de contact, pour que nous puissions vous contacter au sujet d'événements à venir dans la région avignonaise.

freeipmi @ Savannah: FreeIPMI 1.1.2 Released

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:46:44 +0000

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freeipmi/freeipmi-1.1.2.tar.gz

Major Updates:

o In ipmi-oem, support new Dell C410x OEM extensions
slot-power-toggle, slot-power-control, get-port-map,
set-port-map.
o In ipmiconsole, support new --serial-keepalive-empty option.
o In bmc-device, support new --rearm-sensor option.
o In ipmi-oem, add additional Dell get-system-info options.
o In ipmi-sensors, workaround sensor reading issue on Sun Blade
x6250 and Sun Blade 6000M2.
o In libipmiconsole, do not deactivate a SOL payload if it
appears the SOL payload has been stolen, but we did not
receive a SOL deactivating flag.
o In libipmiconsole, fix corner case in which session not closed
cleanly when DEACTIVATE_ONLY flag specified.
o In libipmiconsole, workaround bug in Dell Poweredge M605,
M610, and M915 where instance count of SOL is always returned
as 0.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/NEWS for full release details.

FSF Events: For a Free Digital Society

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:28:10 +0000

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Singapore.

FSF Events: Free Software and Your Freedom

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:26:32 +0000

The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Singapore.

health @ Savannah: GNU Health community keeps growing ! : New partner in India

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:20:21 +0000

Dear all

It's great to see how fast the GNU Health community is growing, not only in installations, but in companies and institutions delivering implementation and training.

The latest service and training provider is Serpent Consulting Services in India.

"Serpent Consulting Services feels immense pleasure to say that we are in partnership with Thymbra and supporting GNU Health" , said Jay Vora, Managing Director from Serpent CS.

So, now, besides de supporting governments (like Brazil or the European Community) and multilateral organizations (like United Nations ), there are private companies that are commited to Free Software in health care using GNU Health.

We'll be generating a map with all the service and training partners in the world, so you can choose the one closest to you.

This raise in the number of service and training providers show that Free Software is both ethical and a great business model.

Thank you to all the health professionals and the community at large that contribute with their talent in suggestions, questions, answers and bug reports.

Finally, our gratitude goes to the GNU project, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation , for adopting GNU Health in their GNU System !

We fight for equity in health care. We deliver health and education with Free Software universally, and it would have been impossible without your contribution.

If you provide services around GNU Health and want your company to be shown in the services section of http://health.gnu.org send us a mail to health@gnusolidario.org and we'll be happy to publish it.

Remember that, as in today, GNU Health runs on Tryton ... just in case ;-)

All the best

Luis Falcon
President
GNU Solidario

FSF Events: Logiciel Libre, Société Libre et Solidaire

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:30:54 +0000

Richard Stallman parlera des buts et de la philosophie du Mouvement du Logiciel Libre, ainsi que de l'histoire du système d'exploitation GNU, qui en combinaison avec le noyau Linux est aujourd’hui utilisé par des dizaines de millions d'utilisateurs dans le monde.

Veuillez remplir notre formulaire de contact, pour que nous puissions vous contacter au sujet d'événements à venir dans la région marseillaise.

GNUCash News: Announcement: GnuCash 2.4.10 Release

gnucash-devel@gnucash.org (GnuCash Developers) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:00:00 +0000

GNOME Commit Digest: Issue 174

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:31:02 +0000

This week… 1611 commits, in 183 projects, by 205 happy hackers (and 216 were translation commits).

In gnome-themes-standard Lapo Calamandrei started using PNGs as assets where possible, instead of SVG files.
Many introspection improvements landed in gjs (support for interfaces, signals, glib properties…), Jasper St. Pierre blogged about GJS Improvements.
Matthias Clasen added a systemd implementation of the session tracking part of gnome-session . (GNOME bug 666891)
David King added an horizontal flip effect to gnome-video-effects . (GNOME bug 666930)
Jasper St. Pierre added back a “popularity” field to extensions.gnome.org.
Empathy was updated by Will Thompson to present confirmation dialogs when closing windows containing chat rooms . (GNOME bug 591756)
In gnumeric Andreas J. Guelzow fixed rich text import from xslx files . (GNOME bug 669083)
Faghmie Davids contributed many improvements to the Firebird provider of libgda.
In gnome-shell Owen Taylor improved the default screencast pipeline, decreasing the quality setting for the vp8 codec from 10 to 8, and increasing the speed setting from 2 to 6 . (GNOME bug 669066)
Stefano Palazzo contributed a Python 3 language file for gtksourceview . (GNOME bug 668136)
Alexander Larsson updated gnome-contacts to use a dialog for avatar changing.
Patricia Santana Cruz changed cheese to use PackageKit to install nautilus-sendto when needed; she wrote about this: PackageKit in Cheese . (GNOME bug 668072)
Damien Sandras reimplemented call control functions into the new Ekiga call window.
In gnome-games Robert Ancell ported uadrapassel from C++ to Vala.
Claudio Saavedra updated eog to hide the titlebar when maximized . (GNOME bug 668652)
In gedit Jesse van den Kieboom added an option to ensure that documents always end with a trailing newline.

Top projects

Project	Commits
gtk+	171
vala	68
baobab	62
gjs	55
evolution-data-server	50
glom	46
nautilus-actions	44
gnome-games	43
ostree	42
glib	41

Top authors

Author	Commits	Modules
Matthias Clasen	73	gtk+, glib, gnome-session and others
Jasper St. Pierre	71	gjs, extensions-web, gobject-introspection and others
Cosimo Cecchi	69	gtk+, gnome-themes-standard, nautilus and others
Daniel Mustieles	52	glabels, nautilus-actions, evolution-data-server and others
Colin Walters	50	ostree, ostree-init, gobject-introspection and others
Chao-Hsiung Liao	48	gnome-terminal, gnome-games, gtksourceview and others
Benjamin Otte	48	gtk+, gnome-themes-standard, glib
Murray Cumming	44	glom, libgda, libepc and others
Paolo Borelli	42	baobab, gtksourceview, gnome-themes-standard and others
Ryan Lortie	39	baobab, gnome-games, jhbuild and others

FSF Blogs: Stop ACTA in Europe, February 11th

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:26:39 +0000

Last week we told you of the ongoing move in Europe against ACTA — now coordinated protests are taking place across Europe on February 11th, and here's how you can get involved.

Read 'Signed, not sealed' and contact your country's Members of the European Parliment

Get involved!

Join the ACTA group on reddit where protests are being organized.
Read Stop ACTA in German or Stop ACTA in English.
Check out the ACTA Protest wiki for information on starting or joining a protest in your area.

If you're not in Europe, please help spread the word to people who are. Defeating it in Europe is the first step to ending it once and for all.

For a refresher on why ACTA threatens free software, see http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta and the impact of ACTA on medicines.

Thank you for speaking up against ACTA,

Matt, Josh and John

idutils @ Savannah: idutils-4.6 released [stable]

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:06:03 +0000

This is to announce a stable release of idutils.
The idutils package contains tools to create and efficiently search
an index of "identifiers" from specified files:

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

Since 4.5 there have been two bug fixes and some build and portability
improvements inherited via gnulib.  See the NEWS below for a summary.

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/idutils/idutils-4.6.tar.xz
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/idutils/idutils-4.6.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/idutils/idutils-4.6.tar.xz

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify idutils-4.6.tar.xz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.68.136-a1a00
  Automake 1.11a
  Gnulib v0.0-6862-g0eab6e2

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 4.6 (2012-02-03) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  lid -L no longer mishandles open-ended ranges like "..2" and "2.."

  lid's -d, -o and -x options now work properly

FSF News: You did your part, now it's our turn to do more for you!

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:03:21 +0000

Even better, we also exceeded our "behind the scenes" goal, which was to sign up at least 400 new members over the two months. I'm really thrilled to welcome so many new supporters, including our 423 new associate members.

On behalf of everyone here at the FSF, I'd like to thank all of you who donated and joined, and all of you who helped promote the effort through your networks. The amount of response this year was incredibly gratifying, and makes me feel extremely optimistic about what we can get done in the year ahead.

I'd specifically like to thank Mark Holmquist, who referred 15 of those 423 new members all by himself, our intern emeritus Danny Piccirillo who went above and beyond in getting the word out, Max and the gang from reddit, and everyone who donated $500 or more to appear on our ThankGNU list.

We had a lot of fun writing the fundraiser pieces this year describing the work of the different staff members here at the FSF, and how we could get more done in each area with increased financial support. We didn't get a chance to write about everyone yet (like, ahem, me!), but we'll pick up where we left off next time. Thank you to all of you who wrote to us with encouraging comments about this series of articles — of course we always worry about annoying our supporters by being too pushy, so it was very good to hear that the articles were worthwhile reading.

Now that you've given us a vote of confidence to do more for you, it's time for us to get to it!

You can keep tabs on our work by signing up for our monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter (along with occasional interim updates), and subscribing to our blogs RSS feed.

I hope to see all of you in person at LibrePlanet this March in Boston! And for anyone who will be at FOSDEM this weekend, look me up.

GNUnet News: Updated behavior of GNUNET_log

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:25:58 +0000

It's currently quite common to see constructions like this all over the code:

#if MESH_DEBUG
  GNUNET_log (GNUNET_ERROR_TYPE_DEBUG,
    "MESH: client disconnected\n");
#endif

The reason for the #if is not to avoid displaying the message when disabled (GNUNET_ERROR_TYPE takes care of that), but to avoid the compiler including it in the binary at all, when compiling GNUnet for platforms with restricted storage space / memory (MIPS routers, ARM plug computers / dev boards, etc).

This presents several problems: the code gets ugly, hard to write and it is very easy to forget to include the #if guards, creating non-consistent code. A new change in GNUNET_log aims to solve these problems.

This change requires to ./configure with at least --enable-logging=verbose to see debug messages.

gnun @ Savannah: GNUnited Nations 0.5 released

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:54:25 +0000

At last, GNUN 0.5 is available, after more than 2 years of development. See the release announcement at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/trans-coord-news/2012-02/msg00000.html.

Andy Wingo: eval, that spectral hound

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:33:49 +0000

Friends, I am not a free man. Eval has been my companion of late, a hellhound on my hack-trail. I give you two instances.

the howl of the-environment, across the ages

As legend has it, in the olden days, Aubrey Jaffer, the duke of SCM, introduced low-level FEXPR-like macros into his Scheme implementation. These allowed users to capture the lexical environment:

(define the-environment
  (procedure->syntax
   (lambda (exp env)
     env)))

Tom Lord inherited this cursed bequest from Jaffer, when he established himself in the nearby earldom of Guile. It so affected him that he added local-eval to Guile, allowing the user to evaluate an expression within a captured local environment:

(define env (let ((x 10)) (the-environment)))
(local-eval 'x env)
=> 10
(local-eval '(set! x 42) env)
(local-eval 'x env)
=> 42

Since then, the tenants of the earldom of Guile have been haunted by this strange leakage of the state of the interpreter into the semantics of Guile.

When the Guile co-maintainer title devolved upon me, I had a plan to vanquish the hound: to compile Guile into fast bytecode. There would be no inefficient association-lists of bindings at run-time. Indeed, there would be no "environment object" to capture. I succeeded, and with Guile 2.0, local-eval, procedure->syntax and the-environment were no more.

But no. As Guile releases started to make it into distributions, and users started to update their code, there arose such a howling on the mailing lists as set my hair on end. The ghost of local-eval was calling: it would not be laid to rest.

I resisted fate, for as long as I could do so in good conscience. In the end, Guile hacker Mark Weaver led an expedition to the mailing list moor, and came back with a plan.

Mark's plan was to have the syntax expander recognize the-environment, and residualize a form that would capture the identities of all lexical bindings. Like this:

(let ((x 10)) (the-environment))
=>
(let ((x 10))
  (make-lexical-environment
   ;; Procedure to wrap captured environment around
   ;; an expression
   wrapper
   ;; Captured variables: only "x" in this case
   (list (capture x))))

I'm taking it a little slow because hey, this is some tricky macrology. Let's look at (capture x) first. How do you capture a variable? In Scheme, with a closure. Like this:

;; Capture a variable with a closure.
;;
(define-syntax-rule (capture var)
  (case-lambda
    ;; When called with no arguments, return the value
    ;; of VAR.
    (() var)
    ;; When called with one argument, set the VAR to the
    ;; new value.
    ((new-val) (set! var new-val))))

The trickier part is reinstating the environment, so that x in a local-eval'd expression results in the invocation of a closure. Identifier syntax to the rescue:

;; The wrapper from above: a procedure that wraps
;; an expression in a lexical environment containing x.
;;
(lambda (exp)
  #`(lambda (x*) ; x* is a fresh temporary var
      (let-syntax ((x (identifier-syntax
                        (_ (x*))
                        ((set! _ val) (x* val)))))
        #,exp)))

By now it's clear what local-eval does: it wraps an expression, using the wrapper procedure from the environment object, evaluates that expression, then calls the resulting procedure with the case-lambda closures that captured the lexical variable.

So it's a bit intricate and nasty in some places, but hey, it finally tames the ghostly hound with modern Scheme. We were able to build local-eval on top of Guile's procedural macros, once a couple of accessors were added to our expander to return the set of bound identifiers visible in an expression, and to query whether those bindings were regular lexicals, or macros, or pattern variables, or whatever.

"watson, your service revolver, please."

As that Guile discussion was winding down, I started to hear the howls from an unexpected quarter: JavaScript. You might have heard, perhaps, that JavaScript eval is crazy. Well, it is. But ES5 strict was meant to kill off its most egregious aspect, in which eval can introduce new local variables to a function.

Now I've been slowly hacking on implementing block-scoped let and const in JavaScriptCore, so that we can consider switching gnome-shell over to use JSC. Beyond standard ES5 supported in JSC, existing gnome-shell code uses let, const, destructuring binding, and modules, all of which are bound to be standardized in the upcoming ES6. So, off to the hack.

My initial approach was to produce a correct implementation, and then make it fast. But the JSC maintainers, inspired by the idea that "let is the new var", wanted to ensure that let was fast from the beginning, so that it doesn't get a bad name with developers. OK, fair enough!

Beyond that, though, it looks like TC39 folk are eager to get let and const into all parts of JavaScript, not just strict mode. Do you hear the hound? It rides again! Now we have to figure out how block scope interacts with non-strict eval. Awooooo!

Thankfully, there seems to be a developing consensus that eval("let x = 20") will not introduce a new block-scoped lexical. So, down boy. The hound is at bay, for now.

life with dogs

I'm making my peace with eval. Certainly in JavaScript it's quite a burden for an implementor, but the current ES6 drafts don't look like they're making the problem worse. And in Scheme, I'm very happy to provide the primitives needed so that local-eval can be implemented in terms of our existing machinery, without needing symbol tables at runtime. But if you are making a new language, as you value your life, don't go walking on the local-eval moors at night!

automake @ Savannah: Automake 1.11.3 released

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:39:24 +0000

GNU Automake 1.11.3 has been released. It is a maintenance release, containing mostly bug fixes and deprecations of obsolete features. But it also introduces a couple new minor features of its own (support for lzip compression of distribution tarballs and for the new EXTRA_foo_DEPENDENCIES variables).

Announcement for 1.11.3:
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2012-02/msg00000.html>

FSF Blogs: GNU spotlight with Karl Berry (January 2012)

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:06:57 +0000

In addition to the usual releases, a new installment of the Lilypond Report has been published. It includes release news, an interview, Prelude #1 in Scheme, and more.

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list. Nearly all GNU software is available from ftp.gnu.org, or preferably one of its mirrors. You can use the URL ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

Several GNU packages are looking for maintainers and other assistance. There's also a general page on how to help GNU, and information on how to submit new packages to GNU.

As always, please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

FSF Events: Free Software in Ethics and in Practice

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:22:21 +0000

Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Coimbatore.

FSF Events: A Free Digital Society

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:10:04 +0000

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Kolkata.

FSF Events: Free Software and Your Freedom

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:40:53 +0000

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Ghaziabad.

guile @ Savannah: GNU Guile 2.0.5 released

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:09:15 +0000

GNU Guile 2.0.5 was just released, to fix the incorrect binary interface information (SONAME) found in libguile in 2.0.4. It does not contain other changes.

Please be sure to upgrade to 2.0.5 if you already installed 2.0.4.
We apologize for the inconvenience.

guile @ Savannah: GNU Guile 2.0.4 released

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:12:31 +0000

We are pleased to announce GNU Guile 2.0.3, the fourth maintenance release of the 2.0.x stable series.

This release provides many bug fixes, including better portability and an improved compatibility with version 1.8, garbage-collection-related performance improvements, and some new features such as a better random state seed, functional file system traversal procedures, and syntax parameters.

See the original announcement at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2012-01/msg00521.html for more details.

FSF Blogs: The GNU Education Project

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:55:59 +0000

The gnu.org website has been enriched with a completely renewed section on education, at http://www.gnu.org/education.

It all began in December 2008 at the "Free Software Free Society" International Conference held in Trivandrum, India. During an informal conversation with Richard Stallman and attendees at the event, the topic of the role of free software in education was brought up and I was asked to take up the task of working on the education section of the Web site. As a free software advocate and a teacher, I always felt that the GNU Project needed to address the subject specifically and in depth, for it is in the education field that its ethical principles find the most fertile ground for achieving the goal of building a better society.

I joined gnu.org with a desire to do more than maintain the pages or add schools and free educational programs to the existing lists. I wanted to build a section structured so as to provide detailed descriptions of schools that have chosen to include exclusively free software in their curricula, and of free educational programs and resources employed in schools. I also saw the need to provide room for articles that would shed more light on the subject. The articles within the section would have to be arranged in a clear scheme so as to make it easy for visitors to find information.

"Case Studies" is the place where we currently present cases of schools that are successfully using and teaching free software. We talk about their experience, the problems they encountered and how they solved them, their motivations, the benefits they gained, and their involvement in and contributions to free software. We do not attempt to build an exhaustive database of schools committed to free software — that is already being done on other Web sites. Instead, in this initial stage we focus on schools whose motivations for the use of free software are on the ethical side rather than centered solely on the technical or economic advantages. We found a few cases, one of which is a school in Argentina: an elementary teacher with limited technical skills managed to get her school to migrate all computers to GNU/Linux by showing decision makers at the school that the use of nonfree software was in contrast with the moral values promoted by the institution.

These cases are part of the data we gather during our observation work. They serve as material for thought in our search for a method to be presented as an educational model that will highlight the impact of free software on society and will be effective to bring its values into the education field.

We also intend to talk to schools that may not have completely grasped the importance and the implications of teaching free software and its ethical principles. We want to support and encourage them in all possible ways.

"Educational Resources" contains educational free software as well as other resources such as free (as in freedom) printed or digital educational materials, and institutions that offer degree courses on the various aspects of free software. As with schools, our aim is not to build exhaustive listings, but to highlight instructive examples.

For educational free software, we report on specific programs that show how software freedom benefits the educational process, with an emphasis on the ethical implications of the use of technology. We base our work on the philosophical grounds of the GNU Project.

A good example of a free program that we present is the case of Tux Paint, used by a school in India to teach students as young as eleven how to put into practice the four freedoms, including freedom 1 — the freedom to study and modify the program. This case alone debunks the myth that being a developer is a requirement to exercise software freedom; it provides evidence that software freedom lives not in the realm of abstract theories but can be exercised by all users, including children.

In the "Education Projects" subsection we mention other groups around the world who are working in the education field and share the principles of the GNU Project. Among others, we mention the Free Software Foundation Europe Education Project and IT@School, the Indian project from the government of Kerala that migrated more than 2,600 public schools to free software.

The section also contains a FAQ page, where we answer the most common issues and questions that we receive; the Education Team page, in which we present in detail our goals, our motivations, and our positions; and a Table of Contents for easy reference.

On the main page, under the title "In Depth", there is a growing list of links to articles that we publish which go deeper into the subject.

By no means do we consider our work finished. On the contrary, it is a starting point. What we have done constitutes a solid foundation for further work. We remain in close contact with people from India since the work being done there in the education field is significant — probably the most successful case in the world of free software implementation on a large scale in schools is found in the state of Kerala. There is also important progress in Latin America and in some regions of Spain; we plan to work on those cases soon.

Many people ask us why we think it is important that educational institutions use and teach free software. They wonder: "What does free software have to do with education?" It is important to note that one of the key concepts at the root of the free software movement is that knowledge is a resource to be shared in freedom so that it can be spread for the benefit of all. Similarly, the whole educational process is based on the sharing and dissemination of knowledge; it is not possible to educate where sharing is forbidden. As Richard Stallman explains:

The source code and the methods of free software are part of human knowledge. The mission of every school is to disseminate human knowledge. Proprietary software is not part of human knowledge. It's secret, restricted knowledge, which schools are not allowed to disseminate. (From a speech at the University of Pavia, Italy, in September 2007, when receiving an honorary degree in Engineering.)

So we would reverse the question: why would a school want to dishonor its duty by bringing nonfree software to the classroom?

The education section thus tends to emphasize the political importance of using and teaching free software and its positive impact on society, a point of view which is shared by all members of the Education Team:

Matteo Gamba is an Italian student of Mathematics at the University of Turin. He came in contact with free software at high school during an awareness program carried out by NGO Hipatia. With other fellow students at the school, he founded the group GURI to promote the principles of the GNU Project and fight against the growing practice of treating knowledge as property.

Matteo is an active member of Hipatia and currently working to elaborate an educational method to transmit the social and ethical values of free software to students. He says, "We need to elaborate a new educational paradigm to get across to the students the social and ethical values of free software."

Matias Croce is an Argentine student of Information Technology Engineering at the National Technological University in the Province of Mendoza. He first knew about free software at his Faculty and became involved by joining local free software groups. He later participated in the foundation of a project based at the Faculty to promote free software. The group organizes events in Mendoza, such as the FSD and FLISoL, the largest free software event in Latin America. Matias contributed the final structure of the new section and the layout of its pages.

Leonardo Favario, an Italian student of Information Technology Engineering, and Raghavendra Selvan, a lecturer in Bangalore who teaches Digital Image Processing using GNU Octave, help with editing our videos.

I myself am of Italian descent born in Argentina and currently based in Italy. I hold a BA in Education and a BA in Translation from the Faculty of Languages of the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. I also completed part of a course of study in Fine Arts at the same university.

I had heard about the existence of a free operating system long ago, but had never paid much attention to it due to my lack of interest in pure technical matters. It was only in 2006, after watching the video of a speech by Richard Stallman, that I understood there is actually much more than just technical issues at the root of the free software movement. I became aware of the importance of spreading the word about software freedom and joined AsSoLi and the Italian GNU Translators Team with that purpose in mind. With a background in the Humanities and Arts, my interest is focused almost exclusively on the philosophical and political aspects of free software.

We invite people who share our goals and our views to join us. We need help to spot special cases of schools and free programs, write reports, talk to schools, edit and convert audio visual materials to free formats, do graphic design, and more. Our contact address is education@gnu.org.

Aleksander Morgado: FOSDEM 2012

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:54:07 +0000

Only some days left for FOSDEM 2012; which this [1] year is organized in Brussels (Belgium).

For anyone interested, I’ll be giving a talk about LTE and ModemManager in the Telephony devroom (room H.2213), in the best time slot possible: Sunday 5th at 09:00 am. If you wake up that early just to attend the talk, you’ll get cookies for free!! [2].

Some GNU hackers will also attend the conference, but this year there won’t be a GNU devroom. If you want to suggest a place for dinner on Friday or Saturday, please do so in the ghm-discuss mailing list.

Cheers and see you there!

[1] (and every)
[2] no, this is not true

Filed under: GNU Planet, Lanedo Planet, Meetings, Planets Tagged: FOSDEM, LTE, ModemManager, NetworkManager

Planet GNU

FSF Events: Por una sociedad digital libre

FSF Events: Copyright vs. Community

Paolo Carlini: C++11 tidbits: Non-static Data Member Initializers

Aleksander Morgado: FOSDEM talk slides online

Sylvain Beucler: Make sure glue isn't stripped

FSF News: Nominations are open for the 14th annual Free Software Awards

Award for the Advancement of Free Software

Award for Projects of Social Benefit

Eligibility

FSF Events: For a Free Digital Society

FSF Events: Rencontre avec Jean Pierre Berlan (agronome et économiste) et Richard Stallman

freeipmi @ Savannah: FreeIPMI 1.1.2 Released

FSF Events: For a Free Digital Society

FSF Events: Free Software and Your Freedom

health @ Savannah: GNU Health community keeps growing ! : New partner in India

FSF Events: Logiciel Libre, Société Libre et Solidaire

GNUCash News: Announcement: GnuCash 2.4.10 Release

GNOME Commit Digest: Issue 174

Top projects

Top authors

FSF Blogs: Stop ACTA in Europe, February 11th

Get involved!

idutils @ Savannah: idutils-4.6 released [stable]

FSF News: You did your part, now it's our turn to do more for you!

GNUnet News: Updated behavior of GNUNET_log

gnun @ Savannah: GNUnited Nations 0.5 released

Andy Wingo: eval, that spectral hound

automake @ Savannah: Automake 1.11.3 released

FSF Blogs: GNU spotlight with Karl Berry (January 2012)

New GNU releases this month:

FSF Events: Free Software in Ethics and in Practice

FSF Events: A Free Digital Society

FSF Events: Free Software and Your Freedom

guile @ Savannah: GNU Guile 2.0.5 released

guile @ Savannah: GNU Guile 2.0.4 released

FSF Blogs: The GNU Education Project

Aleksander Morgado: FOSDEM 2012