* XEmacs 21.4.2 "Developer-Friendly Unix APIs" is released. "Developer-Friendly Unix APIs" is the second in the OXYMORON series. Relative to XEmacs 21.4.1 "Copyleft", it contains a few typo fixes in the documentation and some fixes to critical bugs (including a nasty hang in menus on the Windows platform). More detailed information about the changes is presented below. The first release in this series, Xemacs 21.4.0 "Solid Vapor", contained a large number of improvements and extensions to the current stable version, XEmacs 21.1.14. For more information about the OXYMORON series, see etc/NEWS, the initial release announcement http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/21.4.0.html and the release planning page, http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/. For general information about XEmacs, the developers, and the user community, see our home page, http://www.xemacs.org/. * XEmacs 21.4.2 is "gamma" software. Besides the usual "no warranty" disclaimer (see etc/WARRANTY, sections 10 and 11), we are now experimenting with a level of stability intermediate between "beta" and "stable", dubbed "gamma". At this point all the developers and most of our beta testers trust the 21.4 code base with all their editing needs. However, for several reasons, for users who absolutely must minimize risk, we continue to recommend the 21.1 series. Nevertheless, almost all users will get very high reliability from XEmacs 21.4, and in return, access to many new features and improved functionality. No new destabilizing code will be added; each release in the 21.4 series should be strictly more stable and bug-free than the preceding one. We also recommend the 21.4 series to distribution packagers (such as Linux distributions and the open source BSD "ports" or "packages" maintainers) for their "testing" and "development" distributions. * Changes included in XEmacs 21.4.2 "Developer-Friendly Unix APIs" User-visible behavior changes are flagged with (**). The first two rarely manifest, the other three are feature additions to platforms whose support is still maturing. (Critical bug fixes are not flagged, since you'll be too busy continuing to work to notice the change.) - (**) Stop shifted motion from making active region persist if no motion. - (**) kill-line reverts to same behavior interactively or not. - (**) MS Windows: Printer support now (optionally) adds headers/footers. - (**) MS Windows: Critical-quit works. - (**) GTK: Face editor changes can apply to GTK too. - Fix hang in Customize menu on Windows platforms. - Fix crash with xlc -O3 on AIX. - make-charset handles short-name correctly. - Trivial sign-compare warning fix. - MS Windows: nt/*.mak version string fix and assorted build cleanups. - GCC 3.0 link error from cruft fixed. - make-stds.info builds again with makeinfo 1.68 - Remove CVS keywords from build-report.el. - Miscellaneous documentation fixes. - Add photos, update descriptions in about.el. - Update copyright notice on splash screen. - FTP mirror site updates Thanks to Adrian Aichner, Martin Buchholz, Karl Hegbloom, Yoshiaki Kasahara, Jason Mastaler, Hrvoje Niksic, Andy Piper, and Ben Wing for patches. And thanks to the Fates, I had time for a one-liner. * Getting XEmacs 21.4.2 XEmacs 21.4.2 is available in source form, including pre-compiled "core" Lisp libraries and pre-built Info files, from ftp.xemacs.org and mirrors (http://www.xemacs.org/Download/index.html#mirror_index). See http://www.xemacs.org/Download/ for general information about downloading XEmacs. For those wedded to their old command-line FTP client, the following URLs may be useful: ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.4/xemacs-21.4.2.tar.gz or build the Lisp and Info from source, saving download time, with ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.4/xemacs-21.4.2-src.tar.gz In either case, you need the "packaged Lisp" for more than the most basic functionality. You may use packages previously installed for use with XEmacs 21.1 or later without change. For new installations, the "SUMO" distribution of (almost) all packaged Lisp is available as ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/packages/xemacs-sumo.tar.gz ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/packages/xemacs-mule-sumo.tar.gz The latter should be installed only if you are building XEmacs with the MULE multilingual support; it contains Lisp files that cannot be correctly loaded by a unibyte XEmacs. See README.packages. XEmacs 21.4.2 is also available via anonymous CVS. To get the latest in the 21.4 series, check out (or update) with the "release-21-4" tag. This should be sufficient for almost all users; from now on patches will be carefully screened to ensure that every release is more stable than the last. If for some reason you specifically want this release, use the "r21-4-2" tag. See http://cvs.xemacs.org/ for general instructions on getting XEmacs via anonymous CVS. Binary kits are not planned at this time, except for selected releases for the MS Windows platform. Setups based on the Cygwin "netinstaller", Wise installer, and Installshield are in various degrees of readiness. The adventurous can subscribe to the xemacs-nt mailing list to learn about prerelease tests. The current public release for Windows is based on 21.4.0 "Solid Vapor". http://www.xemacs.org/Download/win32/setup.exe We are considering providing binary kits for important platforms that lack independent distributors (a la the Linux "distributions" or the FreeBSD "ports" maintainers) for at least some releases once 21.4 is accepted as "stable". Volunteers should contact the Release Manager, "Stephen Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt;, and let me know what platforms you can build for. * Important notice for CVS users: The CVS Repository structure has been rationalized thanks to Michael Sperber. The development code is now on the trunk. There are several active branches, each with per-release tags of the form "r21-4-0" (major-minor-patchlevel), and a branch tag which always gives the tip: Branch Branch tag Release tag Development trunk (21.5): none r21-5-xx "Gamma" branch (21.4): release-21-4 r21-4-xx Stable branch (21.1): release-21-1 r21-1-xx The trunk has a special "moving" release tag, "r21-5-latest-beta". This is updated with each release to reflect the most recent beta release. (The Beta Release Maintainer makes some effort to ensure that beta releases at least build; there is no way to make such a guarantee for the tip of the trunk in our development model.) There is no "moving" release tag for stable versions; just use "-r release-21-1" if you need the current release of version 21.1, and "-r release-21-4" for 21.4. To update an existing CVS checkout to the trunk (development), use the -A flag to cvs update. For a fresh checkout, simply use no -r flag. To checkout or update to one of the other branches, use the -r flag with the appropriate branch tag. http://cvs.xemacs.org/ has more information. It is in the process of being updated, so some information about tags may be inaccurate for a few days. * Thanks ... to all the developers, reviewers, and testers; to the Electrotechnical Laboratory and BeOpen.com for financial support; to Tux.org and SourceForge[tm] for hosting services; and to our users. May 10, 2001 XEmacs 21.4 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."