IBM i Open Source Updates August & September 2020
While August had some big hitters, September was very quiet so I decided to only do one update.
New Packages
Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a PostScript and PDF interpreter. It is primarily used to generate PDFs from various input formats. Note that Ghostscript is licensed under the Affero GNU Public Licence (AGPL). This license requires releasing any source code which integrates with Ghostscript even when used in a Software as a Service model. This article has a more thorough walkthrough of the implications.
This fulfills RFE 131308.
GNU Texinfo
GNU Texinfo is the official documentation format of the GNU project. It's similar to man pages, but are built to be a more comprehensive documentation.
For instance, man bash
will tell you the command line options that bash
takes along with some information on how those options affect the behavior and
some info on BASH syntax and things while running info bash
will provide
background on what a shell is, some history on BASH, how to write functions and
pipelines and other things.
Package Updates
Python bugfix for IBM i 7.4
Building C++ Python extensions on IBM i 7.4 (eg. matplotlib) would fail with
linker errors like A symbol name may only be followed by an export attribute or an address. The line is being ignored.
as seen in this issue. This has been fixed.
libsodium SIGILL fix
Certain libsodium functions were calling mlock
and madvise
which are not
supported by PASE and trigger SIGILL. These functions have been disabled from
the builds.
Other Updates
- nodejs14 was updated to 14.11.0
- nodejs12 was updated to 12.18.4
- nodejs10 was updated to 10.22 and 10.22.1
- sqlite3 was updated to 3.23.3 for UPSERT support
- python3 was updated to 3.6.11
- readline was updated to 8.0
Closing
I know a lot of people have been looking forward to Ghostscript for a long time. What do you think? Looking forward to anything else?