[darcs-users] 2.2.0pre1 tarballs ready for testing

[Petr Rockai]

Hello darcs users!

I'm happy to announce that tarballs of first pre-version of darcs 2.2 are now
ready for testing. There are two, one is produced by cabal and one by our
traditional make-based system. The more official, configure-and-make-based
tarball can be found at:

http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.0pre1.tar.gz

A little more experimental tarball, that can only be built with cabal is to be
found at

http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.1.98.1.tar.gz

I have used some "creative" versioning, since cabal refuses any non-numeric
pieces in the version string. Therefore, our consensus with Trent was to use:

- x.98.y for a "pre y" version (or "alpha")
- x.99.y for a "rc y" version

I think this is much less ambiguous than the current practice of just
increasing the 4th digit by one for snapshots.

Other than providing these tarballs, I have drafted a changelog:

  * In interactive record, it is now possible to get a list of
    currently selected hunks (command 'l'). (Christian Kellermann)
  * It is now possible to specify --in-reply-to when using darcs send, to
    generate correct references in the mail header.  (Pavel Shramov)
  * New repositories with --no-pristine-tree can no longer be
    created. This only has effect on legacy darcs-1 repositories.
  * Improvements in Windows support. (Salvatore Insalaco)

  * Extensive manual and online help improvements. (Trent W. Buck)

  * Support for GHC 6.10.

  * Overhaul of the make-based build system. (Trent W. Buck)
  * Cabal is now supported as a build method for darcs. (Duncan Coutts, Petr
    Ročkai, Gwern Branwen)

  * First stab at libdarcs -- when building through Cabal, all of darcs
    implementation is now exposed in modules. No API guarantees
    whatsoever. (Eric Kow)
  * Additions to Haddock documentation of the existing darcs modules for
    improved development experience.

  * Improvements in the testing infrastructure. (Christian Kellermann, Gwern
    Branwen)

  * Low-level optimisations in filesystem code. (Ganesh Sittampalam)
  * Numerous major and minor bug fixes, refactorings and cleanups by David
    Roundy, Eric Kow, Jason Dagit, Dmitry Kurochkin, Thorkil Naur, Salvatore
    Insalaco, Christian Kellerman, Florent Becker, Duncan Coutts, Reinier
    Lamers, Ganesh Sittampalam, Petr Ročkai.

It is incomplete and a little rough at the edges. Please take with a grain of
salt.

Now, I have several pleads for you:

1) We need as many people to test both of these tarballs as possible. The
quality of 2.2 is directly dependent on amount of testing we can get for the
pre-releases. If *you* don't find the bugs, no-one will, and they will creep
into the final release. Thanks for your patience, time and bugreports!

2) It would be nice to have nicely formatted list of issues fixed between 2.1.2
and 2.2.0pre1. I suppose our Issue Manager (currently the hat is worn by
Thorkil) could produce such a list without too much hassle? Ideally, it'd
contain issue number, its title (summary) and possibly the author(s) of the
fix. Thanks!

3) The changelog needs to be proof-read, smoothed over, missing people added,
and it should be augmented with the list of fixed issues. Trent agreed to read
it over when he'll have time, but if you spot missing bits, please let me
know. Also, if I misspelt your name, please yell!

4) It'd be very helpful if someone with HackageDB account could upload the
cabal-based tarball (the one with funny version number). I'll have to get an
account sooner or later, but haven't gotten around to it.

5) The currently last thing I can recall is that http://darcs.net should
probably be updated with this release somehow. I have no idea how is that
done. Kowey, can you help? Thanks!

Thanks again everyone for making this release possible.

Yours RM.

PS: Kowey, I have added some patches in the release branch. Some of them might
be worth pulling back into mainline, others not. If you could review what you
deem appropriate for mainline and what not, that'd be great, so we avoid
superfluous divergence. They should be mostly trivial. As for the GNUmakefile
patch, please apply Trent's version he posted to the list. I will pull it into
branch and resolve the conflicts. Ta.

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation