Re: zsh-2.6-beta17 released

Re: zsh-2.6-beta17 released

[Carlos Carvalho]

[lots of new MereMortalsIncomprehensibleEsotericFeatures descriptions]

Zoltan, are you just draining everything accumulated or did you change
the policy about new features?

Not criticizing, just asking. I'll always use the developmente
versions anyway :-)

Carlos

Re: zsh-2.6-beta17 released

[Zoltan Hidvegi]

> Zoltan, are you just draining everything accumulated or did you change
> the policy about new features?

The new features which appeared in beta17 are not quite new.  They were in
my releases almost from the beginning (which was more than a year ago).

These new features are not really big features.  All of them was very
simple to implement.  Some new features appeared automatically when I
cleaned up the code (eg. the feature that zsh can now handle the null
character in strings is such a side effect).  I dared to add these new
features into beta17 because my earlier releases were used by several
people and noone complained about them.  To be more precise some complained
about not globbing assignments but that's not a new feature it is just the
right way.

I do not plan to add really new features to zsh.  I'd like stable
`production release' as soon as possible since the last `stable' release
has probably much more bugs than the current beta.

Cheers,

Zoltan

Re: zsh-2.6-beta17 released

[Irving Wolfe]

I'd like to suggest that we go ahead and release 2.6-beta17 (with  
the two little patches) as 2.7, after at most a few days more  
testing and, if necessary, minor patching, and then go ahead with  
starting 2.8beta with the next change.

Zoltan's point that what we have here is far better and far less  
buggy than the last released version is quite correct.  I have been  
using his versions for a long time on Sunos, OSF/1, and Nextstep,  
and have found his changes stable and generally free of problems, so  
there is little cause for worry there.  Some of the patches that he  
incorporated are quite useful and I am not sure why they didn't  
make it into the mainstream release, but it is good to see them  
there now.

Regards,
 - Irving

Re: zsh-2.6-beta17 released

[Zoltan Hidvegi]

> I'd like to suggest that we go ahead and release 2.6-beta17 (with  
> the two little patches) as 2.7, after at most a few days more  
> testing and, if necessary, minor patching, and then go ahead with  
> starting 2.8beta with the next change.
> 
> Zoltan's point that what we have here is far better and far less  
> buggy than the last released version is quite correct.  I have been  

I would not be that quick with that.  First as Richard planned the next
production release will be zsh-3.0 and the next beta line will be 3.1.

I do hope that there are no serious bugs in beta17 but there may be
portability problems.  Eg. it turned out that not all C preprodessors
understand the #error directive which I used in builtin.c.  I should
probably use some syntactically incorrect code in place of that.  It also
turned out that some macros and variables have the same name which causes
problems with some compilers and this has been there in previous releases
as well but for some reason noone complained.

Also substitution code still needs some revision.  I want it to be more
compatible with sh (this is a big task, with heavy changes in the lexer so
I'm not sure it'll be done before 3.0).

If 3.0 comes out too early some important changes can be missing from it
which would require an other stable release.

Zoltan

Re: zsh-2.6-beta17 released

[Richard Coleman]

> I'd like to suggest that we go ahead and release 2.6-beta17 (with  
> the two little patches) as 2.7, after at most a few days more  
> testing and, if necessary, minor patching, and then go ahead with  
> starting 2.8beta with the next change.
> 
> Zoltan's point that what we have here is far better and far less  
> buggy than the last released version is quite correct.  I have been  
> using his versions for a long time on Sunos, OSF/1, and Nextstep,  
> and have found his changes stable and generally free of problems, so  
> there is little cause for worry there.  Some of the patches that he  
> incorporated are quite useful and I am not sure why they didn't  
> make it into the mainstream release, but it is good to see them  
> there now.

Before a formal release is made, it might be a good idea to make a
release zsh-3.0-gamma1 and announce it to a much wider audience.  Make an
announcement in comp.unix.shell and try to attract some new testers.
This would probably catch a new round of bugs and portability problems.

This would also be a good time to transition more of the work to
the documentation.

rc