nwu development news #0

So, today I am starting off with a new story series. The nwu development news.
Now what is this series about? Well, to make a long story short, it is about what has recently changed in nwu's codebase and how nwu is coming along.
Just a sidenote, the first story in this series is of course number 0, as real programmers start counting at 0. :-)

For those of you who are now wondering what nwu is or could be, I did write about nwu on this weblog already and the 'nwu - an introduction' post should give you a good idea of what it is.

So, what has changed recently? Basically I merged my changes back into trunk, which means that most of these things are going to be used now. This means that the application framework, the scheduler, the APT "Packages" file parser, support for gzip compression in both the SecureXMLRPC client and server and the brand-new RPC framework are either already being used, or are going to be used soon.

Except for the RPC framework, which would need to be adapted, and the application framework, which depends on nwu.common.config, all these pieces of code also work stand-alone and can be used in other python applications too.

Using parts of nwu in your project

As I promised I am writing about nwu again. But instead of reporting on recent development efforts I would rather like to point something else out today: The nwu.common Python module contains code which can be used stand-alone in your applications. Some of the functions the module provides could come in handy, so I thought it was a good idea to let you know.

This article is going to explain the stand-alone nwu.common.* modules and their function.

Blue-GNU - News for Gnus

I just stumbled accross what seems to be an interesting Free Software news site, named Blue-GNU, and wanted to let you know.

It also seems to be "GNU-approved" as there is a link to it on the (new) gnu.org frontpage.

nwu - an introduction

This article should give you a brief overview of what network-wide updates, one of my projects, is about.

Network wide updates, or nwu, is a free software package licensed under the GPL (version 3 or later). It allows an administrator to remotely install software on and roll out security upgrades to managed computers. It is targeted at GNU/Linux systems using the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) for package management and thus should run fine on all GNU/Linux distributions based on Debian GNU/Linux (such as gNewSense and all Ubuntu flavors).