The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.emacs.xemacs,comp.emacs as well.
Followup set to comp.emacs.xemacs, but the xemacs-beta mailing list is
the preferred channel for discussion.
The XEmacs Review Board has approved a proposal to integrate the
features in the current development branch, and release the next
version of XEmacs on March 1, 2001.
Although XEmacs development code is always publically available, we
hope that many users of the stable version and other versions of Emacs
will take this chance to become beta testers.
The version number will be 22.0.0, based on the proposed inclusion of
several major new features. These are:
o Integration of GTK XEmacs with the main line.
o Availability of "native" widgets such as push buttons, progress
bars, and tab controls, for constructing user interfaces in
Emacs buffers. These are implemented as a generalization of
buffer glyphs (such as ordinary text and images), and so have a
familiar Lisp API. They will be more or less integrated with
the GTK widgets in XEmacsen configured --with-gtk.
o Integration of the Mule API for Emacs with the native Windows
internationalization APIs on the Win32 platforms.
Many other improvements and new features are also in the development
tree.
For more details, visit:
http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/
Discussion of the development process, bugs, etc will take place on
the XEmacs Beta Testers mailing list xemacs-beta. (Occasional short
progress reports will be posted to the comp.emacs.xemacs newsgroup.)
To subscribe to xemacs-beta (or any XEmacs-related mailing list), visit
http://www.xemacs.org/Lists/
or send an e-mail message to xemacs-beta-request(a)xemacs.org with
`subscribe' (without the quotes) as the _body_ of the message.
The prerelease tester versions will be available, as all XEmacs stable
and development code is, by anonymous CVS and anonymous FTP. For
procedures to access anonymous CVS and FTP, please visit
http://cvs.xemacs.org/
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/beta/xemacs-21.2/
respectively. Prelease tarballs will be named something like
xemacs-21.2.40.tar.gz (which is current).
The code released on March 1 will initially be labelled "gamma." This
indicates that it is as stable as we can make it through beta testing,
and we have a high degree of confidence that no bugs that potentially
cause data loss (including crashes and security holes) remain. The
release will be promoted to "stable" upon acceptance by the XEmacs
Stable Release Maintainer.
During the "gamma" period the 21.1 series will continue to be
maintained as the "stable version." It is recommended for
environments where bugs, including configuration glitches and
inadvertant backwards incompatibility, must be kept to the absolute
minimum.
The "gamma" version is intended to be suitable for inclusion in
prerelease packages in downstream distributions (such as the Debian
GNU/Linux "unstable" and "testing" distributions, or the Red Hat
"Rawhide" distribution). It should also be appropriate for "power"
users who are willing to trade the probability of some minor bugs for
the most recent features.
11 January 2001
XEmacs 22.0 Release Manager
Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org>
--
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."