ooc-970622 & oo2c-1.2.8

[acken@informatik.uni-kl.de]

Changes
=======

Fixed channel implementation in Blowfish module.  A program "bfcrypt"
serving as a simple frontend to this module is available in the apps
directory on cognac.  It implements a simple encryption/decryption
filter:
  Usage: bfcrypt -e <key> <text.clear >text.cipher
         bfcrypt -d <key> <text.cipher >text.clear
  This filter uses the Blowfish algorithm to encrypt resp. decrypt the bytes
  taken from stdin and writes the result to stdout.  The key can be up to 56
  characters long.  Longer keys will be truncated.  The cipher text will be 8
  bytes longer than the clear text.  Exit code is 0 on success, 1 if the 
  program was invoked with illegal arguments, and 2 after read or write errors.

Changed methods NewReader/NewWriter of all channel implementations to
return the native Reader/Writer types.  This way those modules can be
used without the need to import anything from module Channel.  This
also means that the interfaces of the channel modules aren't
"standard" O2 anymore, although "conformant" client modules won't
notice any difference.



FTP Server Cleanup
==================

The o2c and gc files plus the files that have been lingering in the
incoming directory for ages have all been moved into a new "misc"
subdirectory.  The ooc.old directory is gone, just like all the old
patches.  Future patches will only be available in gzip format since
they're typically too small for bzip to make much of a difference.
For the large files I'll continue to provide "bzipped" versions.
These changes should keep the size of the ooc directory at bay.

Guy: Is it possible for you to set up a mirror of the /pub/ooc
directory?  There has been some hard disk trouble with cognac recently
and I'd like to have an alternative site somewhere.  This might also
benefit people with bad connections to the German research network.
And if you have any links for o2c in your ORS pointing to the cognac
site please change them to ftp.uni-kl.de and (alternatively) to
cognac:pub/ooc/misc.  ftp.uni-kl.de is the "official" site, but
unfortunately it does some checks on the calling IP name/number,
preventing some people to connect.



Project Status
==============

Tim Teulings VisualOberon library for X11 is getting along nicely.
See http://www.ping.de/sites/edge/VisualOberon.html for details.  In
fact is is stable enough for Mike Griebling to write an application
for it: ExCalc, a glorified calculator.  He'll relese it to the public
when he gets back from vacation.  He also mentioned that he had a set
of localization modules for OOC, but I don't have any details.

Eric Nikitin is writing documentation for the OOC library modules.
The docs use the Texinfo tools of the FSF people, allowing easy
conversion to info, html, and dvi (for printing).  Especially the
"printed" version looks very good!  Eric intends to show a preliminary
version to the mailing list as soon as the chapters on a few selected
modules are completed.  He is currently busy applying the finishing
touches to his introductory book about Oberon scheduled for release in
September.

Yuval Sapir has joined the project again after an absence of over a
year.  He's been working on a Linux/i386 backend for some weekends now
and managed to emit ELF object files with empty procedures.  Which
means that his backend is progressed farther than any other native
code backend :-)

Juergen Zimmermann is having fun with the intricacies of GSA code.
The problem of eliminating unreachable regions is driving him nuts.
Well, the old code tried to do this too, but messed up the code for
some obscure input as Mike found out the hard way.  Juergen also said
that there might be a chance to speed up common subexpression
elimination a little bit.

As for myself: I'm quite happy with oo2c as it is now.  For the next
four months I'll busy myslef with bringing my study to an successful
end.  Although my OOC "to do" list is far from empty (including,
amongst other things, writing the chapters regarding oo2c for Eric's
docs) it's very unlikely that I'll be able to deal with any of the
open issues for the next few months.  Bug reports and questions
(questions? what questions?) are always welcome, though.

-- mva