To: mozilla-general@mozilla.org, mozilla-documentation@mozilla.org
From: Pat Gunn <pgunn01@ibm.net>
Subject: Mozilla Newsletter (10 May 1998)
Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 21:38:47 -0400

Mozilla Newsletter
			10 May 1998 (2nd newsletter)

Welcome to the Mozilla newsletter. The idea of this newsletter is to
describe happenings that are of interest to the Mozilla developer
and/or Mozilla users. You can expect a new version of this newsletter
every week or two, describing the happenings in the Mozilla community
in that time. 

If you have any comments, suggestions, or want to take over
maintenance of this newsletter, please drop me a note at
pgunn01@ibm.net. The most recent version of this newsletter will
be available at http://junior.apk.net/~qc/dok/moz_news, older versions
are available on request via email. 

The first version of the Mozilla Newsletter was on 1 May 1998.

---

In the time since the last FAQ, probably the most important news is
the dismissal of the Wang suit. The story is this: wang claimed that
several extremely common operations in video/text systems were
proprietary to them, including saving of bookmarks, saving of data
retrieved by such systems, and use of file extentions to remember
the type of files. It seems that Microsoft had licensed these capabilities
from Wang when contacted some time prior with Wang's claims,
and so Wang came after Netscape next. It's good to have the foolishness
stopped here before it interferes with Mozilla development or the
developers of other web browsers.

The Mozilla community seems to be suffering some growing pains --
the first real signs of spam have been showing up in the newsgroups
as spammers discover newsgroups that large numbers of people
are subscribed to via mailing lists. Fortunately, the amount of spam
has been relatively light so far. Another sign of growing pains is
the entrance (and egress) of our first disruptive personality on the
newsgroups. 

Some people on various Unix platforms have reported problems getting
their tarballs to untar, and a possible solution has been suggested:
use gnu tar. It's not yet known (to me, anyway) if that fixes the problem
on the affected platforms.

CVS has shown itself to be very useful, although occasionally a pain to
set up for the first time.

A problem has appeared between the most recent versions of EGCS and GCC
and Mozilla -- these versions have libraries that define certain procedures
with the same name as some procedures that Mozilla defines. Until this is
fixed (by either side), GCC 2.7.2 will be the best version of GCC to do work
on Mozilla. 

We've seen a fair number of interesting projects and patches appear within
the last week and a half, from patches that fix some problems with support
of foreign characters to the porting of various other projects to NSPR

There's still plenty of things that are in hot demand that I haven't heard
of people working on, such as autoconf'ing Mozilla, or incorperating
support for 'skins'. 

There have been a large number of requests for features that Communicator
already has, often for the less visible features. Where the fault lies in this
is questionable, but the writing of a manual for advanced users, describing
all of the features that Communicator/Mozilla has that may not be obvious
would probably be worthwhile. Also, making more of the modifications to
Mozilla doable through the preferences dialogs (perhaps in the advanced
section) instead of editing some files directly would probably be a good
idea. 

The format of the tarballs has been subject to some discussion recently,
as the possibility of having Windows users use tarred/gzipped archives
like the Unix users may be needed to overcome certain issues with
the ZIP file format and CVS. A switch to .tar.bz2 was discussed, but
is unlikely, as bzip2 reportedly doesn't build on some Unixes.

Status of each OS:
	Win32: Currently, using VC++ is still the only option, but there
		have been signs of activity in making it build with other
		compilers.
	Win16: AFAIK, nobody has been working on this.
	MacOS: Builds fine
	OS/2: Still working on getting all of NSPR to build and work properly
		As stated before: BE will be based mainly off of Unix,
		FE will first be in X, then a PM FE will be written from scratch
	BeOS: Planning stage
	Rhapsody: Working on NSPR
	Generic Unix: Builds well with Motif, Lesstif is still very instable.



-- 
---------------------------------------------------
Pat Gunn, moderator:comp.sys.newton.announce comoderator:comp.os.os2.moderated
"You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies." -- Dr Who
http://junior.apk.net/~qc
------------------------------------------------