LyX Development News

Unbelievable! Last months issue of LDN broke box office records! 2200 hits in the first 36 hours and almost 6000 just as this issue was published!

We generally get about 3000 hits per month on LDN which is only about one percent of the traffic at the LyX web site.

Who else carried last months LDN?

LinuxToday did. They also carried the July issue which mentioned Richard Stallman's suggestion that we switch from XForms to Gtk or something else that's completely free.


Quote of the Month

Hello Friends!
My name is Kai and I was born the 25.12.2000 at 04:40 in the hospital of Bozen/Bolzano. Even if I was born over a month to early I'm feeling pretty good and am happy to be able finally to see the world around me.
Greetings to all of you until maybe we can meet one day personally!
Ciao,
Kai
P.S.: To show you how I'm made I'll attach a foto of myself to this mail.
P.P.S.: For lyx-devel sorry about the large attachment but I hope you'll forgive me this time :)

Kai Vigna

Kai is the son of Jürgen and Susana Vigna. If he's this active already it should only be a short time before we see his first patch!


Another Quote

Well thanks I did it already (a bit different). One thing I noticed and I would ask you to not do it is remove my () around expressions, that is my coding style and I like to see them where they are.

Jürgen Vigna

Jürgen Vigna writes:
| On 09-Jan-2001 Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
| >
| > I will remove () that has no value when I see them.
|
| I will add () if I find expressions better to read when I need them.

So that you will be able to parse the above sentence? :-)

| > - two points:
| > - () without meaning kindo shows that the coder does not know the
| > precedence rules
|
| da da da ...

what is this, the theme from Jaws?

I certainly like your arguments.

Lars Gullik Bjønnes


Released: LyX-1.1.6

Jan 12, 2001

Read the announcement and go get the brand new LyX stable release. RPM packages for Red Hat based distributions, SuSE and PowerPC are all available from Kayvan Sylvan's FTP site.

Some handy hints for upgraders:


History: GUII

Part 1: The late 0.11 to early 0.13 years

I'm trialling a different format for this GUII history. Rather than trying to squeeze links to emails and threads into a story I'll just summarize each major thread and provide a link to it. Then significant emails within the thread will be pointed out as subitems in the list of threads.

From late-1997 to mid-1998 a backup developers list was run because of intermittent problems with the public developers list. The problems got so bad we switched mail archive and setup our own mailing list host. As a result, many of the development conversations took place on the backup list and weren't archived. I have a few key emails that I've kept in my own archive and will summarise key points in the history below.

That takes us through about a year and half starting from some of the early toolkit switch discussions to the foundations of the GUII abstractions in use in LyX-1.1.6.

By the way, there are a lot more threads and subthreads about GUII and toolkit switches in the archive. I've just tried to provide a general timeline of what happened and how the GUII work evolved. Try searching for keywords like: gui, independence, toolkit, painter, debate and whatever the name of your favourite toolkit, framework or desktop is.


Update: GUII Debate

The GUII debate from the December issue spawned another debate on advogato called The Demon of Portability. John Levon, who is movement in the advogato debate, posted details to the developers list. Asger, who in the end was the main protagonist in the GUII debate, had this to say about the article:

I noticed that the guy on Advogato seemed to think that we did not resolve the issue. I don't know about the rest of you, but I think we actually did resolve the issue:

- Most developers do not feel it's advantageous to go for one front-end only.

The main reason is that GUII is not much more expensive than one front-end only done in a clean way. The trick is to just separate the model from the view/controller, and stop there.

...

I think it is a valuable lesson that is applicable to other projects as well.

Asger Alstrup Nielsen


Mail Threads: LyX Users

José Matos

Standard Disclaimer

The tips that are here are only some of all those that appeared in the LyX Users Mailing list. If you have a tip that you think is worth including, please post it to the LyX users' list, with a note, and I will post it in the next edition.

Keep note of Herbert Voß's site, the tips are presented by subject, and the site is updated often with new tips. Thanks Herbert.

Mailing lists activity

According to the mailing lists archive, 737 messages on LyX developers' list and 419 on LyX users' list, December was a busy month.

Figure 1 shows the mailing lists traffic around December 2000. Notice the peak in earlier December due to Matthias Ettrich's message, as reported in the previous LDN. At the other extreme is the Christmas holidays where traffic was almost nil.

Mailing list traffic histogram

Figure 1: Number of messages of the two mailing lists for December 2000.

The top 10 contributers, in December last year, are:

Development Users
148 Lars Gullik Bjønnes 62 Herbert Voß
138 Jean-Marc Lasgouttes 27 Dekel Tsur
 83 Angus Leeming 22 Yann Collete
 75 John Levon 20 Jean-Marc Lasgouttes
 55 Dekel Tsur 15 Andre Berger
 39 Allan Rae 14 Matěj Cepl
 25 Garst R. Reese 14 Lars Gullik Bjønnes
 14 Ben Cazzolato 11 Tuukka Toivonen
 13 Baruch Even  9 Christopher Jones
 10 José Matos  8 Angus Leeming

Tips

The tips will return in the next LDN. I have built tools to ease the collection of the notes, especially relating them with the mail archive universal resource locators. The statistics above are one side effect of the effort to turn the information into a more readble format.


Movie Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

It's a classic. If you're into Kung Fu movies you'll love it. If you want to be spun out by fantastic effects of people running up walls or across the top of a bamboo forest then this is the movie for you. If you thought "The Emporer and The Assassin" could have used a lot more action and some laughs this is the movie for you. This isn't Jackie Chan slapstick or early seventies Chop Socky so if you haven't seen or liked a Chinese Kung Fu movie before, go and see this one.

Beautiful scenery, a very capable cast, excellent fight scenes, fun, humour and a story that keeps you hooked all the way through to the only disappointment of the movie: the final minute. Don't let 60 seconds put you off a terrific two hour movie though. If you haven't seen it yet, get to your local cinema. If you've seen it already, go watch it again -- I'm going to.


Coming Attractions