RFC: Public announcement of release plan

I'm planning to make a public announcement of the release plan to xemacs-announce, comp.emacs, and comp.emacs.xemacs in two or three days. I would appreciate comments on the announcement. Are there other channels I should spam? ;-) At about the same time, I will be making the web page visible (see patch with Subject: "[xemacsweb] Make Release Plan visible from home page" on xemacs-patches). The content of the patch is (1) Add a notice of the release to "XEmacs Community News" on the top page. (I also deleted some old release notices.) (2) Add a notice to the Releases page. (3) Add a "What's Next" link to the release plan under "About XEmacs" in the sidebar. This is in template.html, so it affects all of the pages on the web site. (Note to Adrian: I haven't fixed template-de.html.) I don't know that "What's Next" is the best label. I also considered "XEmacs TNG" and "Ghost of XEmacs Future" <duck />. Suggestions welcome. To see how this affects the look of the pages, visit http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Tools/XEmacs/xemacsweb/top.html http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Tools/XEmacs/xemacsweb/releases.html I plan to post a revision of XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html to the web site in the next day or so. This isn't quite done yet, but it will follow the proposal I made a few months back. Of course it will incorporate the suggestions made by reviewers. A preview will shortly be available at http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Tools/XEmacs/xemacsweb/xvsgnu.html The current version of the release plan is available (as usual) at http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/index.html Please check the Numbering FAQ in http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/numbering.html I'm not entirely sure it's in good taste. :-) Without further ado: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: xemacs-announce(a)xemacs.org Newsgroups: comp.emacs, comp.emacs.xemacs Subject: XEmacs 22.0 release target and call for testers 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 and the xemacs-announce mailing list. To subscribe to these and other XEmacs-related mailing lists, visit http://www.xemacs.org/mailing-lists/. 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, please visit http://cvs.xemacs.org/. Prelease tarballs will be at ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/beta/21.2/, named similarly to 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. 9 January 2001 XEmacs 22.0 Release Manager Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- 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."