Kiwi News

A number of major changes to the Kiwi build system have been made recently, resulting in some changes to the builing instructions. These instructions are being updated, but in brief, the changes are:

• You may now use versions of SCons later than 1.2.0, if you wish
• You no longer require libnewt, snack, SLang or associated packages as the old newt based menu system has been removed
• You now require ncurses and associated development libraries to build the new lxdialog based menu system

Please ensure that your build configuration is correct after updating your source code copy with the new menu system.

Update (17/08/2010): All instructions are now updated and correct.

The Mac OS X build instructions have been updated, with full support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the latest version of newt and other changes with toolchain upgrades. As part of this, Mac OS X is now, once again, a fully supported build platform.

Building Kiwi on Windows via Cygwin is now supported, and the build instructions have been updated to reflect this. As with Mac OS X, newt will require patching but otherwise it is easy enough. If there are any problems with the instructions, please let lsproc know on the IRC channel. Note cygwin 1.7 is required, 1.5 is not tested and is therefore not supported.

The instructions for building Kiwi on Mac OS X and Darwin have been updated to reflect a change in the build system. Now it should be possible to build Kiwi when using Python 2.5, and you will not need to modify your iconv headers. An omission in the instructions which would prevent Kiwi from being built was also fixed in the code, so now building Kiwi on Darwin and OS X is easier.

If you have modified your iconv headers and have not restored them, please do so now.

As a final note, a rebuild of your toolchain will be required on all platforms regardless as a result of this change.

This is the Kiwi Project, the continuation of the now defunct Exclaim Project. Changes from Exclaim involve a license change, different goals (focusing on trying less ordinary ideas where appropriate), a slower and more controlled development process, a new RCS and a less flashy atmosphere overall.

Kiwi will be under development for a long time, but frequent snapshot releases will be expected to start within a few months. If you are interested in seeing what Kiwi is like, grab the latest code from the Bazaar repository and try it out. We do not have a public bugtracking system, as chances are we know the bug already, however feel free to pop onto IRC and discuss technical aspects of Kiwi as well as any issues you may find.