January 2000 - Zope-Announce

ANNOUNCE: Tucows.com hosts Digital Creations at LinuxWorld Expo
by Hadar Pedhazur 12 Jan '00

12 Jan '00

Tucows.com Inc., one of the leading distributors of Linux software, has invited Digital Creations to share space in their booth at the upcoming LinuxWorld Expo in the Javitz Center in NYC on February 2-4, 2000. Tucows.com wants to showcase innovative businesses and business models in the Linux world and provide an opportunity for greater communication between Linux developers and users. Digital Creations is honored to have been selected. Come to NYC and participate with us in our post Python Conference coming out party!

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How-To: Conditional SQL
by Bill Anderson 08 Jan '00

08 Jan '00

I have written a How-To on how to have a single ZSQL Method be queried in multiple ways, saving you time and space. It can be seen at http://www.zope.org/Members/Bill/Documentation/ConditionalSQL What is Conditional SQL? I tis a term I came up with for lack of a better one. Basically, it is a way of making a single ZSQL method that can be queried by variable fieldnames, and can be queried based upon a wide array of variables without complaint. Let me know what you think. Bill Anderson -- In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks. -- Wilbur Wright in a letter to his father, September 1900

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Oedipus v0.05 released
by Andrew M. Kuchling 06 Jan '00

06 Jan '00

Version 0.05 of the Oedipus package for maintaining a hierarchical database of Web links has been released. (This package was originally called the ODP package, but the new name is more memorable.) Oedipus is a Python package for creating and maintaining hierarchical trees of Web links. An XML format compatible with the Open Directory Project (ODP) is supported; refer to www.dmoz.org for more information about the ODP. In theory, you can load the entire ODP's database and make it available using Oedipus; in practice, I haven't yet verified that the code scales up to that amount of data. A prototype Zope product is included in the package that allows browsing through an Oedipus database. Versions 0.03 and 0.04 were never announced anywhere, so the list of changes from 0.02 is significant: * Scalability has been improved; while I still haven't processed the whole ODP dataset, I've done the 75Mb structure file, and an unknown chunk of the content file. It stopped when I got bored, not when the script crashed. :) * The code no longer require the XML-SIG's parser package; now it can use xmllib.py to parse input data. * Rearranged the Database class to use Metakit to store the data. It should still be possible to implement different persistence methods, such as Zope's BTree object or GDBM, but I don't feel much of a need to do that. Accordingly, the GDBM and ZODB classes have been dropped. * Lots of other classes were rearranged, too. * The code can now be installed using the Distutils. Oedipus can be downloaded from http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/python/oedipus/ . -- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/ Two things I learned for sure during a particularly intense acid trip in my own lost youth: (1) everything is a trivial special case of something else; and, (2) death is a bunch of blue spheres. -- Tim Peters, 1 May 1998

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Zope Weekly News
by Mike Pelletier 05 Jan '00

05 Jan '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening. Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively. Announcements * A security hole has been found and patched. The problem, found thanks to Kevin Littlejohn's efforts, affects those sites which make their Zope management interface available to untrusted users. All Zope users are encouraged to read the announcement and update their Zope installation. Patches are available for both 2.x and 1.x. This patch forced two new Zope releases, 2.1.2 and 1.10.4. http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.2/Zope_212_release New Products * Jephte CLAIN has released a new NT Domain authenticator: jcNTUserFolder. Jephte's Product differs from "htrd"'s in that roles are given through the web and impersonation is not used. http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/jcNTUserFolder Updates * "Drew" updated the Photo Product. Photo resizes images to the user's preferred size. The present version is 0.1.0. http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo * "vladap" updated the mysqlUserFolder Product. This update fixes a folder creation bug. mysqlUserFolder allows you to authenticate users with data stored in a mysql database. It also allows you to store arbitrary per-user data, and it supports HTTP and cookie-based authentication schemes. The present version is 0.3.2. http://www.zope.org/Members/vladap/mysqlUserFolder * Jephte CLAIN has also released two patches, one to the MIME tag, and one to the import/export system. The MIME patch adds *_expr versions of the type, disposition, encode and name attributes of the MIME tag. These allow you to evaluate an expression for the value of the attribute rather than specifying a literal value. The patch also adds the attributes filename and filename_expr to the tag. These attributes supply hints that the client will use to determine the file's name. The import/export patch allows you to import objects through the web instead of having to place files on the filesystem. http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/MIMETag http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/WebImport * "phd" released an update to the mod_pcgi2 package. This update adds a PCGI_ROOT command for virtual hosting. mod_pcgi2 is an Apache module which moves the PCGI client into Apache's address space, preventing the need to start a new process to avoid the "fork tax". The present version is 0.2.0. http://www.zope.org/Members/phd/mod_pcgi2 Zope.org items * "Gregor" had some quibbles with a couple aspects of Zope's user interface. He wrote and submitted a How-To describing how to prevent the "Powered by Zope" link from opening in a frame, and how to make the Zope document editing TEXTAREA soft-wrap. http://www.zope.org/Members/Gregor/misc_nitpicks Notable Discussions * Olivier Deckmyn <olivier.deckmyn(a)mail.dotcom.fr> has just started what stands to be an interesting thread for those wishing to take the first step developing Zope applications. Olivier has a set of classes which implement the logic of the application he wishes to produce. He is looking for advice on how to move from a set of standalone objects to a Zope application. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/016251.html * To ring in the new year, Wei Tao <taow(a)bd748.pku.edu.cn> started a Zope wishlist thread. Got a wish, rant or suggestion? Chime in. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2000-January/016318.html * A thread significant to Product developers: Martijn Faassen <m.faassen(a)vet.uu.nl> desires to develop a set of Product standards. He points out that there are some rather arcane things that one has to do to produce a well-behaved Zope Product, but that many people do not know what they are and even those who do know do not always know _why_ ("voodoo programming"). Martijn makes a number of suggestions to rectify this problem. Chris McDonough graciously offers to contribute some effort to the cause. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2000-January/002823.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2000-January/002824.html -- Mike Pelletier.

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mod_pcgi2 version 0.2.0
by Oleg Broytmann 05 Jan '00

05 Jan '00

Hello! I am happy to present new release of mod_pcgi2 version 0.2.0. New in this release: implemented command PCGI_ROOT that sets root object (folder) for serving under particular location. This actually changes PATH_INFO, prepending root to it. http://www.zope.org/Members/phd/mod_pcgi2 Roadmap to the future: I hope to have yet another release - version 0.3.0 - that will implement yet another new command PCGI_SetEnv to set environment variable specific to this location; this completes virtual hosting support (as I need SiteROOT environment viraiable for SiteAccess). And this is all for version 1. After some period of testing I'll rename version 0.3.0 to 1.0.0! Later (much later - weeks or even months) I will try to modify configure.in to automatically define/undef HAVE_UNION_SEMUN. Oleg. ---- Oleg Broytmann Foundation for Effective Policies phd(a)phd.russ.ru Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.

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SECURITY ALERT
by Christopher Petrilli 04 Jan '00

04 Jan '00

Ok, now that we've got your attention... Thanks to Kevin Littlejohn's sleuthing, a sizable problem in the security machinery in DTML has been brought to our attention and resolved. Without delving too deeply into the obtuseness of the problem, let me first say that this is 1) very critical, 2) has an urgent fix. This problem is of most concern to anyone who opens their Zope site up to the general public (a'la zope.org) as it could allow "anonymous" people to do things which are most definitely not allowed. Unfortunately it was introduced many releases ago, but to our knowledge this is the first time anyone has discovered this problem. Fixes are contained in the CVS repository as well as: Zope 2.1.2 http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.2/ Patch to 1.10.3 http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.2/1104_patch.html It is important to note that the patch to 1.10.3 has some performance impact on users of this release. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to provide equal levels of support for users of 1.x and 2.x implementations of Zope. If there are reasons that your site is unable to transition to 2.x, please let us know so that we can work to resolve them in future releases so that we can finally retire the old 1.x line of code. If you have any questions regarding the impact to your site of the changes, please send them to support(a)digicool.com Chris -- | Christopher Petrilli Python Powered Digital Creations, Inc. | petrilli(a)digicool.com http://www.digicool.com

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New products
by Ava 04 Jan '00

04 Jan '00

Jephte CLAIN has released the following products: - jcNTUserFolder, a product that authenticates users on a NT Domain. The main difference with htrd's product is that roles are given through the web, and impersonation is not used. BEWARE. This is beta for now. Please send you comments - MIMETag patch that add features to the mime tag. - WebImport patch to import files through the web. Following soon: - How to use Zope and IIS together in REMOTE USER mode. Regards, Jephte CLAIN minf7(a)educ.univ-reunion.fr

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