XEmacs 21.4.2 "Developer-Friendly Unix APIs" is Released

goto announcement
From: "Stephen Turnbull, XEmacs 21.4 Release Manager" <stephen@xemacs.org>
To: xemacs-announce@xemacs.org
Subject: XEmacs 21.4.2 "Developer-Friendly Unix APIs" is released.
--text follows this line--

*    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 working 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.  (It will be updated
to reflect the latest information about 21.4.2 shortly; our Webmaster
is taking a well-earned vacation.)  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@xemacs.org>, 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, or simply cvs checkout with 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@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."
goto announcement
Conform with <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Automatically validated by PSGML