Re[2]: XEmacs 21.4.4 "Artificial Intelligence" is released.

Jeff> What's the latest word on 21.4.5? It'll be out in about three weeks, I would guess. I would like to have _some_ improvement in the crashes Adrian is seeing, and that will involve bigger changes than I like to make, thus a week (at least) of prerelease testing. However, since AFAIK those crashes have not been completely diagnosed, I will make no promises at this point. It is unlikely that 21.4.5 will show enormous improvements over 21.4.4; there are substantial restrictions on the kinds of changes I can accept. I think 21.4.4 is acceptable on Windows (and I'm a naysayer, both by disposition and by job description). 21.4.5 will be better. If you definitely disagree about 21.4.4, I doubt that 21.4.5 will make the cut, either. If you tell me specifically what's bothering you, I can be more definitive about whether there are fixes/improvements in the pipeline. Jeff> Since 21.4.4 as I understand doesn't work with Windows. Is Jeff> that still correct? That has not been correct for many releases. Almost all Emacs functionality (the missing part is Mule) is present, and in the praising with faint damns department, XEmacs is definitely more stable than Windows ME, which Microsoft thinks is good enough to install on every PC manufactured.... More optimistically, the core developers, in particular Ben Wing, have been getting excellent performance and at least decent stability for many months now. However, Your Mileage May (and Does) Vary. If you have a "good Windows" platform and avoid "dangerous" usage, you will see as good performance from XEmacs as from most Unix systems, as well as a more consistent, easier to learn GUI. If not .... The problem is still telling which platform is "good," which usage is "dangerous". But the good platforms are now the great majority; dangerous practices, rare. What is currently missing from 21.4 is Mule. There will not be good internationalization support in the stable line until the next major release. But if you don't need it, it doesn't matter. There are a lot of rough edges in the configuration (eg, registry setup and deinstallation), and not everything in the UI conforms with the Book of Gates yet. These will get more and more smoothed out over time. The last big piece (Windows-style printing) fell into place with 21.4. My reservations, which I have been quite public about, have to do with the stability issue. I'm not willing to bet _everybody's_ data, including that of non-developers and non-testers, on XEmacs 21.4 on Windows without knowing a lot about their usage patterns. That's the criterion from the point of view of the Release Manager. If one happened to be like Adrian, it could be a disaster. However, I would bet _my_ data on XEmacs 21.4 if I were forced to use Windows. And I believe it's well worth anyone's while to try XEmacs for a while on the fairly good chance that Adrian's problems are specific to his Windows setup or XEmacs usage patterns---you very likely won't have them. -- 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."