The Google Summer of Code

(reposting from crunchy-discuss)

We have some exciting news: the Google Summer of Code is on, and once again Crunchy has recieved two students. Please join us in welcoming Tao Fei and Florian Birée.

Florian has signed up to integrate Crunchy into MoinMoin (and vice-versa).

Tao's proposal covers a range of tasks from better testing of the crunchy codebase to new logging functionality.

Better OSX support

One of the longest standing issues in the tracker relates to creating proper packages for different systems. Today we took a step towards solving this problem: we figured out how to package Crunchy as an OSX Application that you can just drag and drop to your Applications folder.

This brings the barrier to using Crunchy right down. Now even the least technically minded mac user can install and run it just like they are used to.

As usual, you can get this from the downloads page - look for versions >= 0.9.9.2.

PyCon2008

PyCon 2008 has just finished, and I thought I would post some of the things I have seen that are relevant to Crunchy:

I gave a half hour talk on Crunchy's capabilities and architecture (you can read a short article that accompanied the talk and have look at the slides here). It seemed to be well received, and there were some interesting questions and suggestions from the audience.

A few people were interested in the security implications of Crunchy: one suggestion to fix this is to use SELinux. Brett Cannon's work on sandboxing Python has been on hold as he was rewriting the import system.

The other major item of interest was Michael Foord's talk on using Silverlight. He demonstrated an interpreter very like the one that Crunchy provides - but all the code was running in the browser and was properly sandboxed. Silverlight looks like it might be the way forward for Crunchy: we will be investigating it once we have released version 1.0.

I was also interviewed by Dr. Dobb's Journal about Crunchy: you can hear what I had to say here.

The Current Release - 0.9.9

The current release of Crunchy is 0.9.9a - you can get it here.

Please test this and submit bug reports (either on the crunchy-discuss mailling list or on our bugtracker). We are trying to get a 1.0 release out soon - watch this space!

New Site

Welcome to the new Crunchy website. Somehow the old one got broken, so we've set up this new one to keep you abreast of changes in the Crunchy world.

As you've probably figured out, this site is really just a blog. The idea is that it will be updated when we release new versions or have big announcements.