Codepope's Development Hell

Although Ruby 2.1 hasn’t been released yet, the just release Rubinus Ruby runtime’s version 2.0 is aiming towards being Ruby 2.1 compatible. Rubinus, for those who don’t know of it, is an implementation of Ruby which uses an LLVM JIT compiler, generational garbage collector and native threads to give a Ruby runtime that can run efficiently on all CPU cores of a modern platform. The developers are also maintainers of RubySpec, a 20,000 plus strong library of specifications which map MRI (Matz’s Ruby Implementation), created to assist maintain compatibility with the ‘reference’ Ruby implementation; RubySpec is now used by many other Ruby implementations to ensure compatibility.

The text-search library Lucene and Solr, the search platform built on top of it, have both been updated to version 4.5. Version 4.4 came out in July so what’s changed in this version bump? Well, first of all, for Lucene, the DocValues mechanism which allows typed storage to be associated with documents has been updated to allow for missing values and there’s now an in-memory supporting DocIDSet which is more efficient for carrying around smaller lists of documents.

[ NetBSD 6.1.2 released: The second security/bug-fix release for NetBSD 6.1 is now available with one security fix and fixes for KVM shutdown, USB device enumeration, networking with npf, udf file systems and pthreads. There’s also updated timezone data, a corrected regression for some X apps and a fix for some Emacs 24 crashes. A Lua JVM?: An intriguing experiment has appeared in the form of luje, a “toy” Java virtual machine written in Lua.

LibreOffice gets a maintenance bump: There’s an update for LibreOffice 4.1, the just announced 4.1.2 but the Document Foundation are still not up to recommending it for enterprise adoption and say a 4.0.5 (and soon 4.0.6) version of the office suite is still recommended for that. As usual they’ve scattered the changelogs over 3 different documents (at some point they might think about consolidating minor point updates changelogs into oooh a single release note), but in summary, things have been fixed most of which are listed in the RC1 changelog.

Arduino Tre - Bristling with connections. Arduino has been working with both Intel and TI to create two new boards, both of which are quite interesting departures from their previous designs. Both run Linux, in different ways but while one tries to replace the AVR microcontroller of the classic Arduino, the other hugs the classic Arduino deep into its design. The first board announced was the Arduino Galileo which is powered by Intel’s Quark SoC X1000 running at 400Mhz and in due to be available in November and, according to some reports, will be “less than $80”.

LMCTFY contains itself: A Google project, LMCTFY (Let Me Contain That For You) has emerged in the companies GitHub repository. It’s an open source version of Google’s container stack for Linux though it’s more application isolation and lacks Docker’s filesystem isolation. It’s apparently early days for the Apache licensed software but it will be one to keep an eye on as it could well turn into the basis for a Docker competitor.

The other other open source IaaS Cloud, CloudStack, has had an update with the release of CloudStack 4.2. What’s new? reveals a lot of work which the announcement summarises as 57 new features and 29 improved features such as the ability to plug in external or internal S3-compatible storage services and support for Cisco’s UCS compute chassis and SolidFire storage arrays. A trawl through the release notes shows that there is far more than the headline items though.

The news that XMir and Mir will not be in desktop Ubuntu 13.10 is hardly a surprise. Canonical set an aggressive development schedule and its one they are going to miss on the desktop. Ubuntu Touch is already running Mir as it has no legacy X apps due to it being yet to be released as a finished product and not supporting X anyway. But XMir is critical for the desktop if Canonical want to push Mir into the space they’ve assigned it as core to their graphics strategy.

Eclipse erects Mosquitto net: The MQTT broker Mosquitto is being proposed as a new open source project at Eclipse. It not only implements the TCP based MQTT but has support for MQTT-SN, a connectionless version for UDP and other networks. The plan is to merge Mosquitto and RSMB, a previously closed source MQTT broker implementation, at Eclipse. If, or more when, this proposal is accepted, it will mean that the Eclipse M2M initiative will have a full MQTT cross platform stack under their wing.

RethinkDB gets multi-indexing: The developers of the open source, NoSQL database RethinkDB have announced version 1.10 which comes with the ability to index rows with fields of multiple values, like say an list of tags for a blog entry. Looking for all records with a particular tag previously required slow iteration, but now with the multi-index it is possible to index the set of values within the field and then to “get_all” for a particular tag value using that index.