Long time no post... :-)

I've done some more ports of libsigsegv lately (including Cygwin, which was quite cool as you have to deal with the innards of Win32 exception handling...), and GNU Smalltalk is about to reach 2.1.2 (I do patch releases often when big changes are in their infancy, because then I have much bigger exposure) which I'll release as soon as I find time to test the MacOS X port of libsigsegv once more. Bruno Haible in the meanwhile made a lot of Linux ports (m68k, HPPA, completing my IA64 work, and so on).

The netcat project is not going to leave my harddisk soon, but I did remove the gotos and the source code is in a better state. Next step would be to do IPv6, I'll probably do that around the same time when I'll add IPv6 to GNU Smalltalk (that's when I'll fork for 2.2).

I did some real kewl hacking on Autoconf: I started adding usage of shell functions to it!!! I have 1,5 megs of configure scripts in GNU Smalltalk so I am quite interested in this, and I already got up to 25% improvements in the size of configure scripts only by using functions for seven AC_CHECK_ macros (I still have to do some timing); the Autoconf maintainers (Akim Demaille and Paul Eggert) seem to endorse my work and to consider my approach a sane one, so I am quite optimistic even though I'll probably have to learn more m4 to have it accepted.

If accepted, this work might make other changes to Autoconf possible, with ramifications up to an eventual Autoconf 3 release; it would be a major contribution to free software and I am quite proud of it. Initial results can be found in the Autoconf mailing list archives for May 2003. I already sent a good deal of patches that make everything in good shape for adding shell functions and testing the new code.