Will's blog

It's the last release I do for Lyntin. It's got some new functionality, some bug fixes and I upgraded the license to GPL v3 or later. More on the Lyntin web-site.

Lyntin, one of the projects I spent many many hours on, is now listed in the FreeBSD ports system.

I've passed off Lyntin maintainership to Eugene a few days ago but made the official announcement today on both the mailing list and the web-site. It's sort of bitter-sweet for me. Sweet in that I needed to drop a project or two because I've got too many. Bitter in that I've spent a lot of time working on Lyntin and I'm leaving with a few things I had wanted to do, but never got around to doing. Even so, it was time to hand it off. So ends a chapter of my development life.

The mailing list has been really active. There is definitely a BIG correlation between mailing list activity and my motivation towards fixing things. Some of the things Eugene has said have irked me, but in general he's providing a lot of solid observations which (I think) have led to some really great changes.

In the last few weeks, we've:

• fixed a couple of bugs
• optimized out the get_engine() silliness
• wheedled down the managers (there's still some more to do)
• optimized the get_current_session() routine
• optimized the filter_mapper case of hook spamming
• made some really awesome changes to the python_cmd that make it far more usable

All good stuff none of which would have happened with a quiet mailing list.

Conan had sent me MCCP handling code back in August or September. It took a while to design the filter hooks that needed to go into Lyntin 4.0 to accomodate network-level data fixing (encryption, compression, ...). After I had added those filter hooks, I never quite got enough time to sit down and finish up the MCCP module...

Until now.

Find the first draft of the Lyntin MCCP module here with the rest of my Lyntin modules and rejoice that I finally got this off my todo list! w00t!

After a hiatus, I made some changes to the Lyntin website after looking at the groovy web-site which I discovered after reading Ted's blog.

It's interesting how I can work on something for tens of iterations honing it here and tweaking it there. Then I'll see something that's very similar to what I'm doing and suddenly everything clicks and *voila* I realize what big changes need to be made for a dramatic improvement.

Anyhow, there's a bunch of stuff in CVS for Lyntin that should get summed up into a release. I may tackle Telnet LINEMODE handling (which really needs to get done) and also the MCCP plugin. Eugene has a really slick curses ui which I think has reached a point where it should get included in the main distribution.

Things are afoot once more!

It's nice to release things. Check the website for more details.

There's something wonderful about releasing software. I think it's probably the relief associated with throwing it to the world and knowing that you're done with it. Of course, in this case, since it's another beta, that isn't entirely the case. Though I don't plan on touching it for a few days, at least.

Anyhow, more information at http://lyntin.sourceforge.net/.

Now I'm going to take a nap and get my clippers and go to a party because I get to sleep an extra hour tonight. Whee!

It's been a long time coming, but I keep getting bogged down in other projects. I'm only releasing a tar.gz file. I wanted to do a Windows installer, but I can't seem to get an installer that builds a desktop shortcut. I don't really want to keep throwing time at it either. So if you're inclined to tackle this issue, let me know.

Things in this release:

• Added Python distutils support (will make packaging much much easier).
• Removed the Tintin eval mode and the idea of eval modes.
• Refactored hooks. Hooks now pass around arguments in dicts rather than tuples--this is a big big change from 3.x.
• Split much of Lyntin's internal configuration into the constants module and the config module.
• Wrote a completely new configuration system.
• Overhauled ui's so that they'll work correctly. This also makes it possible to write ui's in other widget systems.
• Split the substitutes module into substitutes and gags.
• Added a configuration ini file for setting boot options.
• Added tagged actions and also the ability for actions to trigger off of text with/without ansi colors removed.
• Fixed a bunch of bugs, some documentation updates (but not many), and additional features here and there (most of which aren't documented yet--sorry guys).

If you discover bugs or have other problems, let me know. I'm on vacation 9/24 through 9/30--so email sent will likely get queued until I read it.

Download here (.tar.gz).

Rock on!

Download it now!

• added #antisubstitute command
• added action priorities
• fixed #read and #write so they're inverses of each other
• changed handling of IAC GA and IAC TELOPT_EOR
• changes to documentation and help system
• fixes to Lyntin so we handle errant mud echo requests better
• added a debugmode (#config debugmod) for making macro writing easier
• cleanup to plugin importing at startup

Read the ChangeLog for gruesome details.

This will be the last release before 4.0 which is scheduled around October 2003. There's some heavy things that are in the plans to be redone between now and then. Read the roadmap for more details and watch this site for news.

Thanks to the folks who helped make this a clean release--their help in the last few weeks discovering and diagnosing bugs has been great!