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We now have a uniform scheme for configuring GNU software packages in order to compile them. This makes it possible to configure all GNU software in the same way. In particular, all GNU software will support the same alternatives for naming machine types and system types.
The configuration scheme also supports configuring a directory that contains several GNU packages with one command. When we have a complete system, this will make it possible to configure the entire system at once, eliminating the need to learn how to configure each of the individual packages that make up the GNU system.
For tools used in compilation, the configuration scheme also lets you specify both the host system and the target system, so you can configure and build cross-compilation tools easily.
Emacs version 19, GCC version 2 and GDB version 4 support the new configuration scheme, as do most of our other programs and collections.
We are developing the GNU Hurd, a set of servers that run on top of Mach. Mach is a free message-passing kernel being developed at CMU. The Hurd servers, working with the GNU C Library, will provide Unix-like functionality. Together with Mach they are the last major components necessary for a complete GNU system. Currently there are free ports of the Mach kernel to the 386 PC and the DEC PMAX workstation. (The PMAX is one kind of MIPS-based DECstation.) Other free ports of Mach are in progress. Contact CMU for more information if you want to help with one of those or start your own. Porting the GNU Hurd and GNU C Library is easy (easier than porting GNU Emacs, certainly easier than porting GCC) once a Mach port to a particular kind of hardware exists.
There are some large projects relating to the Hurd that can be done by
volunteers. Those who can read and understand the source code with
fewer than two questions, and have the time for a large project, are
invited to make themselves known to Michael Bushnell,
mib@gnu.ai.mit.edu.
Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. GNU Emacs 18.59 is the current version. Emacs 18 maintenance continues for simple bug fixes.
Version 19 is in beta-release. See "GNUs Flashes" and "Contents of the Emacs Tape" for details.
Thanks to Alan Carroll and the people who worked on Epoch for generating initial feedback to a multi-windowed Emacs, to Lucid, Inc. for implementing X Selections, faces, the optimizing byte compiler and the default menu bar, to Eric Raymond who has evaluated 460 out of 851 possible new Lisp libraries, and to Stephen Gildea for doing the Emacs 19 reference card.
Features under consideration for later releases of Emacs include:
recover-file also reinstalls the buffer's undo history
g77)
GNU Fortran is in "private" alpha test (testing by a small group of
experts) and is not yet publicly released. Until g77 is fully
released to the public, we ask people to use f2c (a FORTRAN-to-C
translator) with gcc (the GNU C compiler). As g77 uses a
lot of these two tools (the f2c libraries and the gcc back
end), using them and reporting any problems you find will help speed the
release of g77. See "Contents of the Languages Tapes."
The primary focus of the alpha test is to test the g77 front end,
since that has most of the new code. The secondary focus of the alpha
test is to test the integration between the front end and the back end.
Currently, this is where most of the bugs seem to be. The tertiary
focus is the quality of code generated by the GNU back end.
A mailing list exists for those interested in g77. To subscribe,
please ask info-gnu-fortran-request@prep.ai.mit.edu. To
contact the author and/or current maintainer of g77, write to
fortran@prep.ai.mit.edu.
GCC supports both ANSI standard and traditional C, as well as the GNU extensions to C. Two versions of GCC are being maintained in parallel. Version 1 is stable, but is still maintained with bug fixes. For more information about version 1, see "Contents of the Languages Tape."
Version 2 of GCC is now reliable. It also has front ends for the languages C++ and Objective C.
New front ends are being developed, but they are not part of GCC yet. A front end for Fortran is in alpha test. A front end for Ada is being funded through the Ada 9X standards committee. Since it is a quite complex language, we expect completion to take a while. Volunteers are also developing front ends for Modula-3, Pascal and COBOL. For more information about version 2, see "Contents of the Experimental Tape."
Steve Chamberlain, Per Bothner, and others at Cygnus Support have rewritten the binary utilities (including the linker). Version 2 is based on the same Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library used by GDB. All the tools can be run on a host that differs from the target (e.g. cross-linking is supported). Furthermore, various forms of COFF and other object file formats are supported. A tool can now deal with object files in multiple formats all at once. For example, the linker can read object files using two different formats, and write the output in a third format. The linker interprets a superset of the AT&T Linker Command Language, which allows very general control over where segments are placed in memory.
Roland McGrath continues to work on the GNU C Library. It now supports
everything required by the ANSI C-1989 and POSIX 1003.1-1990 standards,
most facilities of POSIX 1003.2, and many additional Unix functions (BSD
and System V). In the Hurd, the C Library will do much of what the
system calls do in Unix. Mike Haertel has written a fast malloc
which wastes less memory than the old GNU malloc. The GNU
regular-expression functions (regex) now mostly conform to the
POSIX 1003.2 standard.
GNU stdio lets you define new kinds of streams, just by writing a
few C functions. The fmemopen function uses this to open a
stream on a string, which can grow as necessary. You can define your
own printf formats to use a C function you have written. For
example, you can safely use format strings from user input to implement
a printf-like function for another programming language.
Extended getopt functions are already used to parse options,
including long options, in many GNU utilities.
Version 1.06 of the GNU C Library has just been released. It includes the relocating allocator used in Emacs 19, as well as new ports to Dynix on Sequent Symmetry, SCO and SVR4 on i386, and Solaris 2 on SPARC. This is the first release to include the GNU C Library Reference Manual. For more information, see "Contents of Experimental Tape."
Rx is a faster implementation of the GNU regex functions. It is
currently in a beta state, and we are not yet distributing it on tape.
For more information, contact Tom Lord,
lord+@andrew.cmu.edu.
Aubrey Jaffer has written JACAL, a symbolic mathematics system for the simplification and manipulation of equations and single- and multiple-valued algebraic expressions constructed of numbers, variables, radicals, and algebraic functions, differential operators, and holonomic functions. In addition, vectors and matrices of the above objects are included.
JACAL is written in Scheme. An IEEE P1178 and R4RS compliant version of
Scheme ("SCM") written in C is available with JACAL. SCM runs on
Amiga, Atari-ST, MS-DOS, NOS/VE, VMS, Unix, and similar systems. SLIB
is a portable Scheme library used by JACAL. Get JACAL, SLIB, and SCM
sources via anonymous FTP from either nexus.yorku.ca in
`/pub/scheme/new', or altdorf.ai.mit.edu in
`/archive/scm', or prep.ai.mit.edu in
`/pub/gnu/jacal'.
The FSF is not distributing JACAL on tape yet. To receive an IBM PC floppy disk with the source and executable files, send $99.00 to:
Aubrey Jaffer, 84 Pleasant Street, Wakefield, MA 01880 USA
make
GNU make version 3.67 has just been released. It now supports
the popular `+=' syntax for appending more text to a variable's
definition. make has come with a standard GNU configure
script since version 3.63. GNU make complies fully with the
POSIX.2 standard, and also supports long options, parallel command
execution, flexible implicit pattern rules, conditional execution, and
powerful text manipulation functions. For those with no vendor-supplied
make utility at all, GNU make now comes with a shell
script called `build.sh' to build make the first time,
before you have any make program to use.
Oleo is a spreadsheet program that can be run either as an X client or
using curses. Support has recently been added both for gnuplot
and for generating embedded Postscript. Oleo still needs documentation.
If you would like to write a Texinfo manual for Oleo, contact Tom Lord,
lord+@andrew.cmu.edu. Please send bug reports regarding
Oleo to bug-oleo@prep.ai.mit.edu. See "Contents of
Experimental Tape."
Originally, each host on the Internet consisted of a single, reasonably powerful computer, capable of handling many users at the same time. Typically, a site (a physical location of computer users) would have only one or two computers, even if they had 20 or more people who used them. If a user at site A wanted to know about users logged on at site B, a simple program could be invoked to query the host at site B about the users who were logged on.
With the onset of more-power-per-person computing, the mainframe has been set aside. A modern computing facility usually consists of one user per host, and many hosts per site. This makes it a trial to find out about logged-on users at another site, since you must query each host to find out about the single user who is logged on.
GNU Finger is a simple and effective way around this problem, and serves as a direct replacement for existing finger programs. For sites with many hosts, a single host may be designated as the finger server host. This host collects information about who is logged on to other hosts at that site. If a user at site A wants to know about users logged on at site B, only the server host need be queried, instead of each host at that site. This is very convenient. (See "Contents of the Utilities Tape".)
The current version of Ghostscript is 2.6. New features include the ability to use the fonts provided by the platform on which Ghostscript runs (X Window System and Microsoft Windows), resulting in much better-looking screen displays; improved text file printing (like enscript); a utility to extract the text from a PostScript document; a much more reliable (and faster) Microsoft Windows implementation; support for Microsoft C/C++ 7.0; drivers for many new printers, including the SPARCprinter, and for TIFF/F (fax) file format; many more Postscript Level 2 facilities, including most of the color space facilities (but not patterns), and the ability to switch between Level 1 and Level 2 dynamically.
Ghostscript accepts commands in Postscript and executes them by writing
directly to a printer, drawing on an X window, or writing to a file that
you can print later (or to a bitmap file that you can manipulate with
other graphics programs). Tim Theisen,
ghostview@cs.wisc.edu, has created Ghostview, a previewer
for multi-page files that runs on top of Ghostscript. Russell Lang,
rjl@monu1.cc.monash.edu.au, has created Ghostview for
Windows, a similar previewer that runs on Microsoft Windows.
Ghostscript includes a C-callable graphics library (for client programs that do not want to deal with the Postscript language). It also supports IBM PCs and compatibles with EGA, VGA, or SuperVGA graphics (but please do not ask the FSF staff any questions about this; we do not use PCs).
The next planned Ghostscript release will be 3.0, available in the first quarter of 1994. It will implement the full PostScript Level 2 language.
GNU Smalltalk implements the traditional features of the Smalltalk language, but not the graphics and window features. Recently someone implemented these and they will appear in a future release.
groff
James Clark has completed groff (GNU troff and related
programs). Written in C++, they can be compiled with GNU C++
Version 2.3 or later.
Bugs in groff will be fixed, but no major new developments are
currently planned. However, groff users are encouraged to
continue to contribute enhancements. Most needed are complete Texinfo
documentation, a grap emulation (a pic preprocessor for
typesetting graphs), a page-makeup postprocessor similar to pm
(see Computing Systems, Vol. 2, No. 2), and an ASCII output
class for pic so that pic can be integrated with Texinfo.
Thanks to all those who have contributed bug reports.
The Texinfo 3 package includes an enhanced Texinfo mode for GNU Emacs,
new versions of the formatting utilities, and the second edition of the
Texinfo Manual. This edition is more thorough and describes over
50 new commands. Texinfo mode now includes commands for automatically
creating and updating nodes and menus, a tedious task when done by hand.
makeinfo, a standalone formatter, and info, a standalone
Info reader are included. Both are written in C and are independent of
GNU Emacs.
GNU Chess is a program that plays chess with you. The program is written entirely in the C language and has been ported to the PC, the Cray-2, and numerous other machines. It has also been ported to other operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS, though these versions are not being supported by the maintainer.
GNU Chess implements many specialized features including the null move heuristic, a hash table with aging, the history heuristic (another form of the earlier killer heuristic), caching of static evaluations, a sophisticated database which lets the program play the first several moves in the game quickly, and so forth.
GNU Chess won the Uniform Platform event held in August 1992 in London, England. Nine programs competed, running on identical hardware.
GNU Chess is primarily supported by Stuart Cracraft on behalf of FSF.
Stuart Cracraft cracraft@ai.mit.edu P.O. Box 2841
Laguna Hills, CA USA Phone: (714) 770--8532
Although we do not yet have a complete GNU system, it is already possible for you to begin porting it. This is because the unfinished part, the Hurd, is basically portable. The parts of the system that really need porting are Mach and the GNU C Library, which are already available to port and use.
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