ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 0.5.6 the "I ought to be doing homework" release

[George <jirka 5z com>]

To find out what Genius is, skip a few paragraphs down, or go to
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Biggest news is really the syntax highlighting since 0.5.5 and a whole
bunch of fixes.  You need GtkSourceView installed for syntax highlighting.

(Note title of the release and thus note the lack of silliness in these
notes:)

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been
the original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing
absolutely everything.  It is programmable has a powerful language and
handles many fun features including matlab like support for matrices.
It requires GNOME2 and a recent enough gmp library.  However you can
still use the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface.

There is still a lot of work required to make this all nice, mostly it needs
to have the function library improved and verified to be correct and
documentation needs to be written (the complete help system is not yet in
place).  Feel free to help out :)

Here are the news in 0.5.6:

* Several leaks fixed
* Several uninitialized data usage fixed
* Tolerances are floats, add aliases 'Sign' and
  'AbsoluteValue' and add the 'Identity' function
* Lots of internal cleanup including not using deprecated
  stuff.
* Start using vicious-extensions lib, and with that
  the 'genius' binary no longer inits gnome which means
  faster startup and faster regression testing runs
* Lots of random minor optimization
  (both performance and memory usage)
* Some build fixes
* Fix systems without wordexp (FreeBSD ports)
* Allow loading programs from the command line
  to gnome-genius
* Use GtkSourceView if available for syntax highlighting
* Handle change directory for filename completition
  correctly
* GUI a teeny bit HIGgier (but not completely)
* Translation updates (Guntupalli Karunakar, Danilo Segan,
  Vincent van Adrighem, Pablo Gonzalo del Campo,
  Francisco Javier F. Serrador, Duarte Loreto, Christian Rose,
  Guntupalli Karunakar, Wang Jian, Mai Hao Hui, Metin Amiroff,
  Jordi Mallach, Xavier Conde Rueda)

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/genius/0.5/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Note that making RPMS should be simple with rpmbuild -ta <tarball>, you
should also get the updated GMP RPM which has MPFR enabled since that's
a lot better then internal FP routines of genius.  RPM for that is on
the 5z site.  I don't know why redhat doesn't enable MPFR in their builds.

Have fun,

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses,
   not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
                       -- Dennis (the bloody peasant)