21.4 Release postponed to 2001/03/26

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."