[Openmcl-devel] New (061205) OpenMCL snapshots available

[Gary Byers]

Compressed tar archives for DarwinPPC(32/64),LinuxPPC(32/64),DarwinX8664,
LinuxX8664, and FreeBSDX8664 are now available in

<ftp://clozure.com/pub/testing>

As always, these archives are self-contained (contain sources, binaries,
interfaces, and the CVS ChangeLog and release-notes.txt file.)

(The short version of the release notes is that this release mostly
just packages up recent bugfixes. The slightly longer release-notes
entry appears below.)

OpenMCL 1.1-pre-061205
- This release is intended to package up the bug fixes since
   the 061110 tarballs.  There aren't too many changes in
   functionality or any deep architectural changes since 061110,
   and it should be easy to bootstrap from current sources with
   061110 images.
   (It'd still be a good idea to recompile your code with
   up-to-date images, whether you download those images or
   build them yourself from CVS.)
- The one (barely) notable change in functionality has to do
   with how the lisp sets up pathname translations for the
   "ccl" logical host when the "CCL_DEFAULT_DIRECTORY" environment
   variable isn't set (e.g., when a shell script isn't used to
   invoke the lisp.)  Previous versions just used the current
   directory; this version tries to use the directory containing
   the current heap image.  The new scheme might get fooled by
   symbolic links (either following them or not following them
   could be wrong), but it's more likely to work for people
   who don't read or understand the discussion of the shell script
   in the documentation.
- All (knock wood) bugs that have been reported since the 061110
   images were released should be fixed.  Well, almost all.  The
   fixes include:

   - a typo (wrong register) in the "generic" version of the
     code which implements (SETF AREF) on 2-dimensional arrays
     on x86-64
   - incorrect bounds checking on vector references on x86-64,
     which caused some invalid indices to be treated as valid
     (usually leading to a segfault).  IIRC, the invalid indices
     that were erroneously accepted were fixnums whose absolute
     value was > (expt 2 56).  (More or less.).
   - Missing stream methods (especially involving string streams)
     affecting all platforms.
   - Several bugs involving GCD, some of which were specific to
     64-bit platforms and some of which affected all platforms.
     (These bugs sometimes affected results returned by #'/,
     LCM, and other funtions.)
   - OpenMCL has only ever supported an ELEMENT-TYPE argument of
     ([signed,unsigned]-byte 8|16|32|64) on binary file streams (with
     64-bit types supported only on 64-bit platforms.)  It has not
     previously tried to upgrade a supplied element-type to a supported
     one (it does now) and any errors that resulted from supplying an
     element-type that was not supported (and could not be upgraded) were
     either obscure side-effects or quiet misbehavior; an error (a
     SIMPLE-ERROR complaining about the unsupported element type) is now
     signaled as soon as attempts to upgrade to a supported element type
     fail.  I believe that the current behavior is both compliant and
     reasonable; it's probably better to discuss that issue on
     openmcl-devel than to do so here.