[VM] Announcement: 8.2.0a (alpha testing) release

[rlk]

Uday Reddy writes:
 > The VM release 8.2.0a is available for download from the Launchpad
 > web site.
 > 
 >     https://launchpad.net/vm
 > 
 > This will become the public 8.2.0 release sometime in mid-summer.
 > So, I encourage all users to download it and test it.

I do like to keep abreast of the development of VM, so I just spent two hours
unsuccessfully trying to install and use this release.  I'll try and recount
the problems I encountered.

First, I am running emacs 23.3.1 on an X86-64 system with Slackware 13.0.0.0.0
Linux version 2.6.29.6 (address@hidden) (gcc version 4.3.3 (GCC) ) #2 SMP Mon
Aug 17 11:58:18 CDT 2009 

I downloaded vm-8.2.0a.tgz and untarred it without issue, but the directory
vm-8.2.0a and everything in it were owned by 1004:513.  After fixing that I
discovered that the configure file could not be executed.  I solved that by
using "sh ~/configure".  My setup is very plain so that appeared to work as
did "make ; make install".  But attempting to use the new version of VM I
immediately found that it could not use qp-decode - the error message being
that qp-decode could not be found.  In a shell I determined that using the
rejected path given in the error message I could run qp-decode.  After a small
amount of time trying to locate the problem I simply moved all the relevant
programs to /usr/local/bin, changed and recompiled .vm and that problem went
away.  But now with any multipart mime program with a plain text part
(us-ascii or utf-8) the plain text would simply not be displayed.  Spending
some time reading the NEWS and inspecting my .vm was no productive so I simply
reverted to version 8.1.0 and all is again well.

I'll try again at the next release.

Thank you for all of your work on maintaining and upgrading VM.

-- Bob