FINAL target for release of XEmacs 21.4

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detailed information about the release is available at http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/ (currently somewhat out of date; it should be up-to-date in about 24 hours from the date of this message).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&gt; 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."