[Openmcl-devel] Clozure CL 1.2-rc1 available

Thu Apr 24 04:29:22 PDT 2008

Gary Byers <gb at clozure.com> wrote:

> As threatened/promised for ... well, for a long time now, Clozure CL 1.2-rc1
> tarballs are now available in:
>
> <ftp://clozure.com/pub/release/1.2/>
>
> The tar archives in that directory contain svn 1.4.x (not CVS)
> metainformation and are larger than usual as a result ("svn
> metainformation" means something very much like "two copies of
> everything", so that's to be expected.)  If you prefer, you can
> also use a subversion client to download everything:
>
> shell> svn co http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/release/1.2/PLATFORM/ccl
>
> - where PLATFORM is one of linuxppc, darwinppc, linuxx8664, darwinx8664, or
> freebsdx8664 - will check out all sources and binaries/interfaces for the
> specified platform.
>
> At least one minor annoyance: doing
>
> ? (require "COCOA-APPLICATION")
>
> will generate a warning about a free variable reference in some EasyGUI
> method, just before saving the application bundle.  (I noticed this a
> week ago and promptly forgot about it.  Don't laugh: you'll be old
> someday, too.)
>
> Release notes (which are in ccl/doc/release-notes.txt) follow:
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ClozureCL 1.2
> =============
>
> Welcome to the first ClozureCL (aka OpenMCL) release in about 2.5 years!
> (There have been a lot of 1.1-prerelease snapshots in that time frame,
> and there's been a lot of development activity; hopefully, it'll be
> a little easier for people who wish to use a relatively stable version
> to do so and still make it easy for those who want to track the bleeding
> edge of development to do so.)
>
> [In the fall of 2007, Alice Hartley of Digitool announced that MCL (the
> commercial product from which OpenMCL was derived) would be opensourced.
> In order to reduce potential confusion between the new "open MCL" and
> "OpenMCL" - and to coincidentally make the primary implementation package
> and default installation directory name ("ccl") meaningful again - we
> decided to rename OpenMCL to "Clozure CL" (or "CCL").  There are still
> references to the old name in URLs, bits and pieces of the lisp itself,
> mailing lists, and elsewhere.]
>
> Obtaining Clozure CL
> --------------------
> Gzip'ed tar archives of Clozure CL 1.2  are available via anonymous FTP
> from:
>
> <ftp://clozure.com/pub/release/1.2>
>
> in files whose names are of the form
> clozurecl-1.2-[RELEASE-LEVEL-]PLATFORM.tar.gz
>
> where
> RELEASE-LEVEL may be "rcN" to indicate "release candidate N", or absent, and
> PLATFORM is one of "linuxppc", "darwinppc", "linuxx8664", "darwinx8664", or
> "freebsdx8664".  The "ppc" archives contain 32- and 64-bit binaries and
> interfaces; the x8664 archives are (still) 64-bit only.  All archives
> contain full sources and documentation, and also svn 1.4x metainformation
> (see below.)
>
> It's also possible to check out content equivalent to any of these
> archives by using an "svn" client (again, see below.).  The URL is of the
> form:
>
> http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/release/1.2/PLATFORM/ccl
>
> where PLATFORM is defined as above.
>
> To check out a fresh copy of the current CCL 1.2 distribution for DarwinPPC,
> one would do something like:
>
> shell> cd some-directory-that-doesn't-have-a-ccl-subdirectory
> shell> svn co http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/release/1.2/darwinppc/ccl
>
> We plan on making disk images (.dmg files) containing the Cocaa IDE and
> the full CCL distribution available in the near future.
>
> Documentation
> -------------
>
> Documentation is available online at:
>
> <http://ccl.clozure.com/ccl-documentation.html>
>
> A recent version of the HTML documentation is also included in the
> distribution, along with the DocBook source from which it's derived.
> These release notes describe some important recent (for some value
> of "recent") changes.
>
> Bug Reporting
> -------------
>
> Please use the trac instance at
>
> <http://trac.clozure.com/openmcl>
>
> to review existing bug reports and submit new ones.
>
> CVS out, SVN in:
> ---------------
>
> Until the spring of 2007, ClozureCL used CVS for revision control;
> tar archives for the 1.0 release and 1.1 snapshots contained CVS
> metainformation, and it was generally possible to use "cvs update"
> and related commands to update an installation to the latest version.
>
> At that time, we switched to using the Subversion ("SVN") revision
> control system, but continued to mirror the main line of development
> in CVS (to the extent that this was possible, given some limitations
> of CVS.)
>
> This release is entirely SVN-based and makes use of Subversion features
> that can't be supported in CVS. Subversion clients are widely available
> for all platforms that ClozureCL runs on:
>
>   - FreeBSD and Linux users will likely find that subversion packages
>     are readily available through their distribution's package management
>     systems.
>
>   - 'svn' is preinstalled on OSX Leopard
>
>   - OSX Tiger users can install Subversion via Fink or MacPorts, or
>     look at <http://downloads.open.collab.net/binaries.html> for other
>     options.
>
> It should be possible to use GUI svn clients if you prefer.
>
> Note that the tar archives that contain ClozureCL distributions
> contain svn metainformation that assumes the use of a version 1.4 or
> later svn client; the format of some of that metainformation isn't
> understood by older clients.  If you have an older client (and can't
> install something more up-to-date), you ignore the tarballs and just
> check out the full CCL distribution (sources, binaries, interfaces
> ...) via svn.
>
> Quick guide to svn:
> ------------------
> shell> cd ccl           # wherever that is ...
> shell> svn update       # try to synch working copy with svn repository
>
> shell> svn revert <files> # discard local changes to <files>, recover
>                            # versions from last update.
>
> svn notes/issues
> ----------------
>
> svn does a fairly good job of handling binary files, and in fact the
> CCL lisp kernel, heap image, and interface database files are maintained
> in svn.  (One benefit of this scheme is that it may be a little easier
> to distribute modified heap images that reflect changes that may be hard
> to bootstrap from source.)  Occasionally, an "svn update" operation may
> fail to replace a locally-modified copy of a binary file; when this
> happens, one way to recover is to use "svn revert" to discard local
> changes.
>
> The "Welcome ..." banner (and the string returned by
> LISP-IMPLEMENTATION-VERSION) contain the repository's revision number
> (an integer that increases whenever any file in the CCL repository
> changes) as of the time that the lisp image is built.  If there are
> locally-modified files (including re-compiled kernels or heap images)
> in the working copy, the revision number may contain a trailing "M"
> character; this isn't very significant, but might be a little mysterious.
>
> 1.1 release notes
> -----------------
> All of the information contained in the file ccl/doc/release-notes-1.1.txt
> should be incorporated into the documentation; people who didn't use
> the 1.1 "snapshot" releases might find that file to be worth skimming.
> Some highlights include:
>
>   - use of Unicode internally, and support for reading and writing streams
> encoded in many commonly-used character encoding schemes.
>   - support for 64-bit x86 (amd64/x86-64) hardware (32-bit Intel support
> is under active development, but is not yet ready for public consumption.)
>   - many changes to the Cocoa Bridge, lots of enhancements to the Cocoa-based
> IDE (which runs on 32-bit DarwinPPC under Tiger and Leopard and on 64-bit
> DarwinX8664 on Leopard.
>   - lots of other changes (didn't I already write down descriptions of
> them somewhere ?
>
> More recent changes
> -------------------
>
> - The keywords :MCL and :OPENMCL-HASH-CONSING have been removed from
> *FEATURES*, and the keywords :CLOZURE-COMMON-LISP, :CCL and :CCL-1.2
> have been added.  :OPENMCL-HASH-CONSING denoted an experimental
> feature that was never used, and the presence of :MCL created some
> confusion (OpenMCL/CCL and commercial MCL have been diverging for
> about 10 years now, and many of the things that typically need read-time
> conditionalization - pathname syntax, threading, networking ... - need
> to be conditionalized differently for the two implementations.)  Code
> that has used the presence/absence of the :MCL feature to conditionalize
> for OpenMCL may need to be reviewed.
>
> The presence of :CCL-1.2 should be viewed as "features described in the
> Clozure CL 1.2 documentation are present", i.e., "this is at least version
> 1.2 of CCL".
>
> There should also be a "simple" keyword denoting the OS name - :LINUX,
> :DARWIN, or :FREEBSD.
>
> - sockets support :CONNECT-TIMEOUT arguments and streams (including sockets)
> support :READ-TIMEOUT and :WRITE-TIMEOUT arguments in their creation functions
> (OPEN, MAKE-SOCKET, etc.)  An active socket connect operation that takes
> longer than the number of seconds specified in the socket's :CONNECT-TIMEOUT
> argument - or an I/O operation that takes longer than the applicable
> :READ-TIMEOUT or :WRITE-TIMEOUT's argument - will cause an error to be
> signaled.
>
> - profiling via Apple's CHUD tools (finally) works on 64-bit versions of
> CCL.  See ccl/library/chud-metering.txt for details.
>
> - profiling on x86-64 Linux - using the 'oprofile' profiler - is now 
> supported (or, more accurately, it's possible to generate symbolic 
> information that allows 'oprofile' and related tools to give meaningful
> names to lisp functions.)  See ccl/library/oprofile.txt for details.
>
> - on OSX/Darwin, pathnames are now recognized as being encoded in
> "decomposed UTF-8", which isn't quite as bad as it sounds.  (This
> should mean that pathnames that contain non-ASCII characters should
> be handled correctly.)
>
> - in the Cocoa IDE, Hemlock editor commands now run in the main event
> thread (they used to run in a dedicated, per-window thread), and many
> other aspects of Hemlock/Cocoa integration have been simplified and
> improved.  Aside from offering greater stability, these changes make
> the Hemlock programming interface a lot more tractable.  People
> interested in writing Hemlock editor commands for use in the IDE may
> find a revised version of the Hemlock Command Implementor's Manual
> <http://trac.clozure.com/openmcl/wiki/HemlockProgrammer> useful.
>
> When run as a standalone application, the IDE provides a "console"
> window which displays diagnostic output that otherwise only appears
> in the system logs.
>
> - lots of bug fixes, smaller changes, and performance improvements.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Openmcl-devel at clozure.com
> http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel
>

-- 
5th European Lisp Workshop at ECOOP 2008, July 7: http://elw.bknr.net/2008/

Didier Verna, didier at lrde.epita.fr, http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier

EPITA / LRDE, 14-16 rue Voltaire   Tel.+33 (0)1 44 08 01 85
94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France   Fax.+33 (0)1 53 14 59 22  didier at xemacs.org