Frontier Kernel News

Important bug fix for outline-saving

A bug report on the opmlsupport mail list from David Wilkinson, requiring an immediate fix....

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/opmlsupport/message/873

The bug: If something was hoisted, and the user saved, only the currently-visible text would be saved. Any non-visible text would be lost if the user closed the window after saving. This bug has been there for a long time, since we started saving outlines in XML. It's fixed by a change in Frontier.tools.data.windowTypes.outlinerFile.save.

At first I thought it would require a kernel change, to emulate the code when packing an outline (it pops all hoists, does the pack and then restores them), but I found a way to do this in a script.

The updated version of outlinerFile.save is here:

http://matrix.scripting.com/blogs/gems/cd/outlinerFile.save.ftsc

I felt this change was so important that it be included in all forks of the codebase, after sufficient review. Data loss is a serious issue, as you can see in Mr Wilkinson's post.

Seattle Frontier developer meetup, Tuesday night

Attention Frontier kernel developers in Seattle. We're having a meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the Crossroads in Bellevue, to make face-to-face contact, and discuss various projects including the Python-in-Frontier work that David Brown is doing. So far it's Dave Luebbert, Dave Brown and myself. You're welcome even if your first name isn't Dave. Newbies are welcome too, but please C programmers only. We're going to start pretty early, either 6PM or 7PM and go for a couple of hours. Waiting to hear back from both Daves on the time.

Introducing Frontier 10.0a1

This is a fresh start for the Frontier kernel, the technology under Manila and Radio UserLand, and in the future, possibly many more useful system and network applications. We're releasing the code under the GPL, the rationale for this is explained in the FAQ and in the audio blog post I recorded about this event.

Note there's a new mail list, managed by Dave Luebbert, for answering technical questions about the release. We're not trying to boil the ocean, or displace your favorite open source scripting environment, web server or content management system. However, we would like anyone interested in Frontier to participate if they have the time and technical background and inclination to do so. We're setting expectations low. It's like a message in a bottle or a time capsule or a bridge to the future. Who knows if or when someone will find this technology useful? But now we are assured that it will continue to exist for the indefinite future. That in itself is an accomplishment.

Even if you're not the kind of person who works on open source programming projects, I recorded an audio blog post yesterday that explains what's going on. And if you are a technical person and wonder how a high-powered content system written in C might work, please proceed to the download page and get started.

Thanks to Andre Radke, for doing a thorough and careful job of releasing the Frontier source. I have always enjoyed working with him, and I'm glad we could work together again on this codebase that we cared so much for for quite a few years. He does great work, if you ever get a chance to work with him, grab with both hands!

Andre's brain dumps

Andre Radke wrote some very useful docs about working on the Frontier kernel a few years back. Here they are...

1. Adding new kernel verbs.

2. TCP/IP Networking.

3. Compiling and Executing UserTalk Scripts.

4. Database Structure.

5. Database File Format.

6. Multi-threading.