XEmacs 22.0 Release Target and Call For Testers

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&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."