[Gcl-devel] Release proposal

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  I'd like to do the following if feasible:

1) release 2.5.0 on or about 2/15
2) possible minor bugfix if necessary release by 2/25
3) be largely unavailable for GCL work from 3/1 - 6/1

The question now is what should go in this release.  Unfortunately,
even if we do ship an ansi binary, it will be considerably incomplete.
It still may be worth doing, but we have to find a way to clearly
indicate to the user that ansi support is still a work in progress,
lest (s)he become disenchanted :-).  Here is the most ambitious plan,
which may be doable:

1) rework the ansi build to load the pcl and clcs modules in the .text
   section, as is currently done with modules in the lsp and cmpnew
   directories.  This will enable people wanting to do a (si::link
   ...) build of, say, maxima with the ansi image should they desire.

2) Ship both images, and have the shell wrapper toggle with the -ansi
   switch. 

3) Eliminate varargs, and verify that GCL will consequently build with
   gcc 3.3 

Unfortunately, it looks as if the following will have to wait, though
this is now my preferred long term solution to the image size
question:

4) Load as many modules as possible via the autoload mechanism
   currently used for readline.o. 

I'd also like to run the test suite as part of the build, and compare
against a known failures list.  It seems that there are a few
very minor issues remaining accounting for a large majority of the
failures.  It would be nice to get a small list of simple fixes which
would reduce the failure number as much as possible.  For example,
(typep <vector object> <array-class>) is nil.  but (typep <vector
object> <vector-class>) is t.  I thought typep was not supposed to
traverse the class-precedence list (unlike subtypep)?  I can't see
from the spec where the existing behavior is wrong.

Take care,

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah