It's that time of the month again. Time to sit up till all hours of the night getting LDN written :-)
We have a couple of big news items this month. First, we have the release of the much awaited LyX-1.1.6fix2 with its many bug fixes and documentation improvements. The second item is the announcement of this years LyX Developers Meeting.
This years LyX Developers Meeting will be held toward the end of next month. These meetings are very important to both advancing LyX and team building among the developers. Almost all of the significant changes between the release of 1.1.5 and 1.1.6 started its life at last years meeting. Many of those changes were both massive in effect and fundamental in nature -- cleaning up the core of LyX and separating out the code into more manageable modules. As with previous years you don't have to be a core developer to attend but if you aren't a programmer you'll either be writing documentation or fetching-and-carrying.
The team is also moving closer to a prerelease of 1.2.0 with Lars posting a short todo list to the developers list while I'm writing this column. That'll make three todo lists he's posted this year so 1.2.0pre1 must be only a week away now ;-)
And myself too as I have to know how much people will come to see if they fit all in (and organize enough PC's so that at least n-x people can work at the same time [ you probably ask what is 'n' and what is 'x', but that's a secret ;])
— Jürgen
I want an assert on x != n
— Lars
Would delta_n - delta_x = 1 and delta_x = 1 fit in your plannings?
— André
Well IMO there's no problem having enough PC's I'm just thinking that not all participants should have one so that:
- One always is free to bring fresh beer!
- We are forced to build teams!
Where 1 is more important than 2 #:O)
— Jürgen
Update Thanks to Antonio Gulino for pointing out a few incomplete links above.
BTW Juergen, what are the latest plans for June?
No changes! We have to work, work, work!!! Well maybe we have some beer, wine, ... and then obviously we have the obligatory sightseeing tour and you know how that day ended last time, don't you. If you don't remember have another look at the fotos especially the one Lars asleep #:O)
...
[signature quote]
The kind of danger people most enjoy is the kind they can watch from a safe place.— Jürgen
This seems strangely appropriate. I might just wait here...
— Allan
Well you would have to have really good eyes, wouldn't you?
— Jürgen
No, I'll just watch the world news or at least the Italian news service. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out which story is referring to "drunken hackers run amok at village swimming pool" ;-)
— Allan
LyX is one of my absolute favorite piece of software, I really love it, and I think this version is really a big step forward.
Long live the LyX developers!— EagleIce
This was with respect to LyX-1.1.6fix1.
I'm looking for a package that would help me to write complex boolean sentences, like "the cat is black or it is white and it eats mice" (it's for a very technical paper about cats ;) without ambiguity. I think about something like this:
and |- or | |- the cat is black | |- it is white |- it eats mice
Update Thomas provided a very funny explanation for the boolean cats.
The wait is over! Jean-Marc Lasgouttes summarised this release as follows:
The long overdue second update to LyX 1.1.6 has finally been released. It fixes a lot of annoying or severe bugs, but also features documentation updates, as well as DocBook support improvements.
Note that this version does not fix all the tabular problems experienced by LyX 1.1.6 users. Many of these problems have been fixed in our development tree, but require changes too important to be part of a fix release.
There is a long, long list of fixes and documentation updates in his announcement.
There are a number of RPM packages available based on Kayvan Sylvan's excellent work. These include RPMs for Red Hat or Mandrake in both i386 and PowerPC formats. SuSE RPMs are expected soon.
This years LyX Developers Meeting will be hosted by Jürgen Vigna in Bozen in northern Italy between the 21st and the 26th of June. Jürgen also hosted the 3rd meeting and that was a great success. Once again we are asking for a sponsor to assist in covering the expenses of the meeting. Last year SuSE were our sponsors and while some of that money was spent on feeding the hungry developers most of the money went towards upgrades of our web and development servers.
Any sponsor will get prominent advertising space on all our web pages and other promotions can be discussed. Please contact Lars Gullik Bjønnes directly if you'd like to sponsor this years meeting.
So far it seems that Jean-Marc, Lars, André, Asger, José and of course Jürgen will be attending.
At the time of writing André Pönitz was up to the 75th patch for cleaning up Mathed. He's been very busy learning, reformatting, breaking and rewriting for a couple of months now. Some of the bug fixes have been back-ported into 1.1.6fix2 but generally the work is still unstable and therefore unsuitable for a stable release. There has been some discussion about moving his work into a branch of CVS and reverting Mathed to a known stable (although still a little buggy) state but at present such a step probably won't occur until after the first prerelease -- when it's hoped we'll learn of all the as yet unknown flaws in the revised Mathed. André provided a summary of what is broken, or at least almost working, with his 74th patch.
Some of the areas André has worked on so far are:
Recent discussions have covered the use of align environments instead of eqnarray environments and the possibility of always using AMS math for math support.
Ruurd A. Reitsma had been doing his own work on getting LyX running with Cygwin on Windows and discovered that Claus Hentschel's port handled some things he was having problems with while his port was better than Claus's in other areas. He has since worked to combine both their efforts into a patch which has now been included into the CVS repository.