FINAL target for release of XEmacs 21.4
23 years, 8 months
Stephen J. Turnbull
Stephen J. Turnbull
To all the long-suffering XEmacs users and developers:
XEmacs 21.4 is scheduled for release on April 15, 2001.
After a series of setbacks and management sidetracks, for which I take
responsibility, I can now see a clear path to a release of XEmacs
21.4. I now have the tools necessary to create a release, and the
XEmacs Reviewers have declared that they see no showstopping bugs in
the current beta test releases. So over the next two weeks I'll be
cleaning up the adminstrative aspects and creating test distributions.
Barring discovery of showstopping bugs, this date is firm. I expect
no further postponements.
There still remain a number of known bugs that the developers are
working on, and fixes will be tested and applied. Final documentation
updates are in progress. You are of course invited to participate in
fixing and testing (join the xemacs-beta mailing list at
http://www.xemacs.org/Lists/).
More detailed information about the release is available at
http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/
(currently somewhat out of date; it should be up-to-date in about 24
hours from the date of this message).
As mentioned before, I consider this release to be a "gamma" release.
It is stable for our testers; the developers themselves and many
testers use it for all their work. Of course, experience leads us to
expect that broader usage will uncover more bugs, and users new to
this release will probably find "less-than-optimal" user interfaces.
Nonetheless, we strongly encourage you to try it out, and expect that
you will find it both stable and the most effective XEmacs ever.
However, we will continue to actively support and upgrade XEmacs 21.1
(currently at release 21.1.14, with a release of 21.1.15 expected in
the not too distant future) for a few weeks at least. Of course,
XEmacs 21.1 will continue to be available, and important fixes to 21.1
will be developed and released, for some time.
Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org>
Release Manager, XEmacs 21.4
--
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________
What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."
- 1 participants
- 0 comments
21.4 Release postponed to 2001/03/26
23 years, 9 months
Stephen J. Turnbull
Stephen J. Turnbull
Due to a couple of "showstopper" class bugs and the unavailability of
several core developers for the next few days, the release of XEmacs
21.4 is being postponed again, until March 26.
After a number of "technical difficulties" including mailing list
problems and a completely unrelated bug that happened to be tickled by
compiling one of the new Lisp files, the merge of the GTK code into
the mainline has been completed.
It is a remarkable testimony to the strength of the basic design of
XEmacs, now about ten years old, that the addition of both a new event
loop and a new display device required almost no changes to existing
code outside of preprocessor or Lisp conditionals testing for the GTK
feature. The GTK code itself is still very experimental and may be
unstable, but we expect it to have no adverse impact on the rest of
XEmacs in the release branch, so we will release it for those who
would like to experiment with it.
Several important bugs have been isolated and fixed, and others are in
the process of analysis. The test versions of XEmacs 21.4 are very
stable for most users on most platforms, and we expect to knock out or
provide workarounds for the remaining known showstoppers within a few
days. In particular MS Windows users are very happy with the
improvements in functionality and stability.
I will have time over the next few days to (finally) update the
release pages again. A preliminary look at NEWS should be available
by the time you see this. See
http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/
for the latest information, including links to the bug status report
and the draft NEWS file. There's also a link to the page for testers
there; more testing is always welcome! Other aspects of the release
pages will be updated over the next few days.
Thank you for your support!
Stephen J. Turnbull
Release Manager, XEmacs 21.4
--
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________
What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."
- 1 participants
- 0 comments