1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!-- -*- html -*- -->
2 <!--#set var="css" value="sxemacs.css" -->
3 <!--#set var="title" value="SXEmacs News" -->
4 <!--#set var="banner" value="Hey Man, What's the buzz?" -->
5 <!--#set var="copyright" value="2004 - 2016 Steve Youngs" -->
7 <!--#include virtual="/templates/header.template" -->
8 <!--#include virtual="/templates/menu.template" -->
9 <!--#include virtual="/templates/support.template" -->
13 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.17 "Hudson Custom Eight" has been released!</em>
15 <u>22.1.17 Highlights</u>
19 Bugs closed in this release: 183 184
22 Packaging Infrastructure (PUI) -- Youngs.<br /><br />
24 The big change here is that SXEmacs now uses FFI and libcurl to
25 download packages whenever possible. EFS can still be used for FTP
26 download sites but at present we only have a single HTTPS site
27 available. This means that, for the time being, FFI and libcurl are
28 mandatory requirements for using PUI for remote package installs. I
29 see that as a feature, not a bug. ;-)<br /><br />
31 The old "Pre-Release" packages have been removed.<br /><br />
33 The index file has been renamed to "package-index"
36 FFI -- Youngs.<br /><br />
38 ffi-curl.el was extended and improved so that it could be used as a
39 transport backend for PUI. As a result, the following forms are valid
40 and available for use:
43 (file-exists-p "http://example.com/filename")
44 (file-readable-p "http://example.com/filename")
45 (insert-file-contents-literally "http://example.com/filename")
46 (copy-file "http://example.com/filename" "/local/file")
47 (expand-file-name "http://example.com/filename")
48 (file-name-directory "http://example.com/filename")
49 (file-name-nondirectory "http://example.com/filename")
52 ffi-magic.el was rewritten, bringing in most of file(1)'s features and
53 capabilities. See the doc string of #'magic:file for the new options
54 and example usage.<br /><br />
65 ffi-magic.el can also be used to enable automatic coding system
66 detection. In-file coding cookies and local variables sections are
67 honoured, as is explicitly setting the coding system. IOW, the magic
68 auto-detection only kicks in if the coding system isn't already set
69 some other way. To get the magic, add this form to your init...
73 (magic:find-file-magic-alist-enable)
76 ffi-wand.el no longer supports PDF. This was because certain versions
77 of libWand would cause crashes on PDF files, and the versions that
78 didn't the performance and user experience was flakey at best.
81 Build Chain -- Youngs<br /><br />
83 Better, more reliable and robust libffi detection<br />
84 config.{guess,sub} updated<br />
85 Use a distro-agnostic way of detecting glibc version<br />
87 Clean up all warnings from the autogen.sh script
90 Internals / elisp -- Youngs, Ferreira<br /><br />
92 Use the system malloc in all cases instead of the old, crusty,
93 in-house malloc we had.<br /><br />
95 A way to prevent certain OpenSSL ciphers from being used. This was
96 done because some ciphers have been known to causes crashes and data
97 corruption.<br /><br />
99 A couple of tweaks for GNU compat reasons with
103 #'define-obsolete-variable-alias
104 #'define-obsolete-function-alias
107 info.el updated to correctly handle UTF-8 info docs (note that some
108 MULE packages are still needed for the complete user experience)<br /><br />
110 #'directory-files and #'directory-files-recur were updated and fixed
111 so that now they do what their doc strings say they can. ;-)
117 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.16 "Hillman Hunter" has been released!</em>
119 <u>22.1.16 Higlights</u>
123 Bugs closed in this release: 132, 141, 152, 155, 156, 158,
124 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176,
128 Multimedia fixes/updates -- Ferreira, Youngs.<br />
129 SoX and FFmpeg support was brought back and mostly fixed.
130 PulseAudio has been brought back, and support for "media
134 Build chain fixes/updates -- Meier, Ferreira, Burkhardt,
136 A lot of work went into stamping out compiler warnings and
137 errors to give us a much cleaner/safer build.
140 FFI updates -- Zajcev, Youngs.
143 Don't reset the cursor upon exit on a TTY -- Youngs.<br />
144 Since the beginning of time, whenever you exited emacs on a
145 TTY you'd find that your cursor had been reset to a horrible
146 great big block. We thought that you'd probably prefer to
147 have the cursor you were using before you started SXEmacs.
150 Contrib updates/fixes/additions -- Ferreira, Youngs.<br />
151 Of note here is the rewritten 'git-for-steve.sh' script. It
152 is designed for SXEmacs developers, both old and new, to
153 help get everything super organised in their git repo and
154 fast-track them to contributing and hacking.
157 Make docs compatible with Texinfo 5.x -- Youngs.
160 Support Unix user/group lookups -- Ferreira.
163 XDG compliance -- Youngs.<br />
164 SXEmacs now looks for user files in locations that are much
165 more inline with modern standards and conventions.<br />
167 `user-init-directory' is now ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/sxemacs or
168 ~/.config/sxemacs if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set.<br />
170 User packages will now be searched for in
171 ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/sxemacs (~/.local/share/sxemacs).<br />
173 The old legacy directory `~/.sxemacs' is still supported,
174 and in fact will still be used if the XDG directories don't
175 exist and it (the legacy dir) does. A user can also force
176 use of the legacy directory if they so choose.
179 Add wildcard support to #'find-file et al. -- Youngs.
182 Fix coding cookies -- Youngs.
185 "In-tree builds" are no longer supported. --
189 TTY related fixes/updates -- Ferreira.
192 Various minor updates/tweaks/fixes -- Burkhardt, Ferreira,
199 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.15 "Goggomobil" has been released!</em>
201 <u>22.1.15 Higlights</u>
205 Bugs closed in this release: 76, 78, 88, 106, 108, 112, 121,
206 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139,
210 Coverity integrity scan fixes -- Ferreira.<br />
211 <a href="https://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> offers
212 source code integrity analysis scans. These scans often
213 uncover bugs and security issues that would otherwise go
214 unnoticed. When we first scanned the SXEmacs code base
215 with the Coverity scanner we had ourselves roughly 500
216 "defects". Nelson Ferreira has pretty much
217 single-handedly fixed them ALL!! Well done, Nelson and
221 Build related fixes/updates -- Ferreira, Freundt, Horelick,
234 Bitrot removal -- Burkhardt, Youngs.<br />
235 We got rid of some stuff too, including: aRts, GTKv1,
236 tooltalk, and a bunch of stuff from lib-src.
239 Whitespace cleansing -- Youngs.
242 Support libpng 1.5.x -- Youngs.
248 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.14 "Geo" has been released!</em>
250 <u>22.1.14 Highlights</u>
253 This release cycle was all about upating all of the versioning
254 information and the build chain to be compatible with git.
259 <em>SXEmacs switches to git</em>
261 People have been asking for it ever since we started this
262 project. Well, it is now a reality… The SXEmacs
263 sources are now kept in a git repository.
266 The migration went very smoothly, a lot smoother than I was
267 anticipating. Which was nice. There was one downside,
268 however… History. We lost all of the history up to
269 this point. Technically, it's not <em>completely</em> lost.
270 It is just not in the git repo. You can still get all the
271 history you could ever want by leeching the tla repos. And
272 don't forget that when we first forked from XEmacs we lost all
273 of the XEmacs CVS history. That never caused any problems or
274 issues, so I don't expect it to this time.
277 As of right now, the SXEmacs git repo is open for business.
278 You can get our latest sources with…
280 <code>git clone https://git.sxemacs.org/sxemacs</code>
282 That URL is deliberately <strong>not</strong> a hyperlink
283 because you can only get to that URL with a git client.
286 Till next time…<br />
292 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.12 "Fiat" has been released!</em>
294 <u>22.1.12 Highlights</u>
298 Bugs closed in this release: 69, 86, 107, 109, 110, 111,
299 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120
302 Build chain fixes and updates -- Ferreira, Freundt, Youngs.
304 <li>Fix building without eye-candy (*bars, widgets, etc)</li>
305 <li>Begin work on getting SXEmacs built on Arm Linux</li>
306 <li>Fix NetBSD 5 build</li>
307 <li>Mac OS build fixes</li>
310 <li>FFI improvements, updates, and enhancements -- Zajcev</li>
312 Source tree reorganisation -- Ferreira. Nelson put a lot of
313 working into reorganising the SXEmacs source tree hierarchy.
314 This was done with the view to making maintenance and debugging
315 easier, and also to simplify adding new features. There are
316 now several subdirectories under src…
323 <th>New src hierarchy</th>
326 <td>src/database</td>
327 <td>has the database code</td>
331 <td>has the "Enhance Number Types" code</td>
335 <td>has the "events" code</td>
339 <td>has all the multimedia code</td>
343 <td>has memory related code</td>
347 <td>has the MULE stuff</td>
351 <td>has the UI code common to all toolkits</td>
355 <td>has the old (non-working) GTK 1 code</td>
359 <td>has the TTY UI code</td>
363 <td>has the X11 UI code</td>
366 <td>src/ui/lwlib</td>
367 <td>has the Lucid stuff</td>
375 <em>We Are Still ALIVE!!</em>
377 Contrary to popular opinion, this project is still very much
378 alive and kicking. Sure, sometimes we take extended breaks,
379 but we always come back to "tinker". :-) A lot has
380 been going on in the lives of us mortal develpers during this
381 last year. The unfortunate thing for SXEmacs was that not
382 much of the goings on were SXEmacs-related. Which is why
383 you've not seen much in the way of activity here for the last
387 A few of the more notible SXEmacs-related things that did
388 happen in the last 12 months have been…
392 We moved to a new hosting provider. All of SXEmacs,
393 (including website, issue tracker, mailing lists, downloads,
394 and the main source repo), is now served up to you by the
396 <a href="https://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi" target="_blank">Dreamhost</a>.
399 We skipped a version! Erm, long story, short… it was
400 to do with the move to the new host, and it was simply
401 best for Steve's sanity and tla revision numbering to just
402 skip a version. So 22.1.12 is now the current development
404 <a href="/changes/ChangeLog-22.1.11" target="_blank">ChangeLog for 22.1.11</a>
405 if you want to take a look at what went on during that dev
409 <a href="/people/njsf.html" target="_blank">Nelson</a> has
410 been the busiest of us. One of the things he has been
411 working on has been a huge re-organisation of the src
412 directory. Instead of all of the C source being lumped into
413 a single directory, it is now split into logical
414 sub-directories. It is now much tidier, and a lot easier to
415 maintain and work with.
419 That's about it on the news front. Hopefully we'll be able to
420 cut a new release some time fairly soon. My hope is for
421 before the end of the year.
424 Till next time…<br />
430 <em>Website updates</em>
432 The SXEmacs website has undergone a bit of work recently.
433 Hopefully it'll make your stay more enjoyable, and you'll want
434 to come back again and again. Bring your friends!
437 Some of the new stuff…
440 <li>"Google" Friends widget</li>
441 <li>A "Twitter Ticker" tracking emacs related tweets</li>
442 <li>Google Ads. Hey, we gotta eat. Please click em</li>
443 <li>New screenshot "thumbnails" page</li>
444 <li>Some cosmetic updates to maintain consistent look/feel</li>
449 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.10 "Excalibur" has been released!</em>
451 <u>22.1.10 Highlights</u>
455 Bugs closed in this release: 41, 65, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82,
456 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100,
460 Cool New Sexy Stuff. Of course every release must have some
461 cool new stuff. Here's what's new in this release…
467 It's possible to display video in a glyph object in a buffer.
470 SXEmacs is now a fairly decent image
471 viewing/manipulation app. There's an undo/redo stack,
472 zoom in/out, rotate, chop/crop, red-eye reduction.
473 There is a whole swag of transformations supported:
474 charcoal, contrast, despeckle, edge, enhance, equalise,
475 gausian blur, negate, normalise, oil painting, radial
476 blur, 3D button effect, sharpen, solarise, and
477 swirl. Who needs The Gimp when you have SXEmacs!
480 Added some MacOS icons.
483 Support for sqlite3 via FFI
486 New way for SXEmacs to handle different file types. It
487 allows you to have #'find-file take different actions
488 based on a predicate. See the new variable
489 `find-file-magic-files-alist'.
492 Enable PNG transparent backgrounds. Unfortunately this
493 doesn't work if you use a background pixmap.
496 FFI callbacks implemented.
499 Dbus support via FFI (not completed). This should be
500 considered very much incomplete and experimental. Only
501 rudimentary support is there so far.
506 Build chain fixes/improvements. Quite a few build chain
507 related changes were made in this release, including…
509 <li>Work around a bug in GCC 4.5.0</li>
510 <li>Powerpc/BSD cpu detection</li>
511 <li>A Freedesktop.org compliant sxemacs.desktop file is now installed.</li>
512 <li>Updated FFmpeg detection.</li>
513 <li>OpenSSL 1.0.0 detection. OpenSSL is no on by default.</li>
514 <li>Fix a link error when building with no MPQ</li>
515 <li>Fix a minor bison related issue (YYSTYPE)</li>
516 <li>Fix building with latest SoX</li>
517 <li>Fix --without-x builds</li>
518 <li>Fix many C compiler warnings and elisp byte-compiler warnings.</li>
519 <li>Fix install for non-FFI and non-Mule builds</li>
520 <li>Fix etags build for systems without getopt_long</li>
521 <li>Fix (hopefully) parallel builds</li>
522 <li>Fix BDWGC-enabled builds</li>
525 <li>Minor updates to BDWGC code.</li>
526 <li>Catch up with latest ffmpeg API changes.</li>
527 <li>Fix for latest ediff.</li>
528 <li>Fix for subwindow resizing.</li>
529 <li>FFI improvements.</li>
532 <li>Cleaner dump file (less pollution from the build/src dir).</li>
534 Improve #'file-basename. It can now take a 2nd arg for
537 <li>Misc doc fixes/updates.</li>
542 <em>Chat with the developers</em>
544 Do you have a SXEmacs problem that can't wait for email to go
545 back and forth? Or do you have some amazing new feature you'd
546 like to see in SXEmacs but can't wait to tell someone? Or
547 perhaps you just wanna shoot the breeze? Well your troubles
551 The SXEmacs web site now offers real-time chat with the
552 developers. See the "SXEmacs Chat" menu entry on
553 each page, or follow <a href="irc.html">this link</a>.
558 <em>News RSS feed back up!</em>
560 Yep, that's right. After years of no news RSS, it has finally
561 been fixed. Many thanks and kudos to Hynek Schlawack for the
562 sexy new Python script that RSS-ifies the entries on the
568 <em>Mailing list subscriptions fixed!</em>
570 Subscribing to the mailing lists is now working again. Please
571 accept our deepest apologies for taking so long to get this
572 issue sorted out. It was some corruption in the affected
573 lists' config.pck and the backups were corrupt as well.
574 Removing the lists and then recreating them solved the
575 problem. The original member db remained intact, as did the
576 archives, so all being well everthing should just work.
581 <em>Updated items in the shop!</em>
583 You've seen the blood-dripping beta logo, now you can get that
584 on your T-shirt, or coffee mug, even on a courier bag, or wall
585 clock. Go check out <a href="store.html">the shop</a>!
590 <em>Behind the scenes updates to SXEmacs website</em>
592 We've made a few changes under the hood at the SXEmacs
593 website. Pretty much all of the HTML has been re-written from
594 the ground up. And if Steve did it right, you shouldn't
595 notice a thing. :-) Almost all of the changes made were
596 designed to do 2 things…
599 <li>Preserve look/feel across entire site</li>
601 Easier maintenance for the
602 <a href="mailto:webmaster@sxemacs.org">webmaster</a>
608 <em>SXEmacs website offers retail therapy</em>
610 Do you need retail therapy? We can help. We've just
611 added two outlets for your frustrations. One for the
612 memorabilia junkie at our
613 <a href="store.html">SXEmacs Store</a>. And one for
614 those special occasions at our
615 <a href="amazon.html">Amazon Store</a>.
618 Be sure to check them both out, and spend up big! :-) All
619 the proceeds go to keeping the SXEmacs Project running.
624 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.9 "Edsel" has been released!</em>
626 <u>22.1.9 Highlights</u>
630 Bugs closed in this release: 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
631 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56,
632 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62. See our
633 <a href="https://issues.sxemacs.org/">Issue Tracker</a> for
637 New garbage collector BDWGC. SXEmacs can now use the
638 Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector. It is still
639 experimental at this stage and there are known bugs
640 (memory leak). If you have plenty of RAM it is quite
641 usable, and noticably faster than non-BDWGC SXEmacsen.
642 This new feature is not on by default. To get it,
643 configure with --with-experimental-features=all.
646 Support 256 colour terminals. Support for 256 colour
647 terminals and colour resolution through approximation
651 New function, #'mapfam. This new function is an
652 extrememly powerful replacement for _all_ of the current
653 map functions. It not only can do the job of the
654 existing map functions, but can also convert any
655 sequence to any other sequence. Lots of other cool
656 features as well, see its doc string for full details.
659 New FFI util, ffi-magic.el. Uses libmagic to guess file
663 Cool new stuff in the contrib directory. There are tla
664 hook scripts, build scripts, and build-report scripts.
667 Build chain fixes and improvements. Better detection of
668 ALSA, ffmpeg, libffi, libbind, and many other various
669 bits and pieces. General build related fixes were made
670 for MacOS, Solaris, HPUX, and of course, Linux.
673 Init file migration code removed. We feel that it is
674 better to NOT mess with other emacsen's set ups.
677 Compiler warning fixes.
680 PNG images optimised for size.
683 Re-work auto-autoloads loading a little. Priority is
684 given to packages installed under ~/.sxemacs/ and care
685 is taken to eliminate those "foo-autoloads already
689 Support for BSD's MP removed.
692 Emodule search path/loading fixes. Emodule load path
693 has been made sane. #'load-module and #'locate-module
694 have both been vastly improved and both have completion.
697 FFI improvements. The FFI code has been improved so that
698 it can be compatible with XEmacs 21.5 for when they
699 merge our FFI into their code base. Also #'ffi-load and
700 #'ffi-load-library no longer need to be given a file
701 extension as part of the arg to allow for different
702 platforms having different shlib extensions. Also, some
703 UI enhancements were added to ffi-curl.el and
707 Etags improvements. A bit of "UI" has been added to
708 etags.el, as well as some code optimising.
714 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.8 "Daimler" has been released!</em>
716 <u>22.1.8 Highlights</u>
720 Bugs closed in this release: 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31.
721 The reason for the apparent double up of closed bugs
722 from the previous release is because our bug index got
723 reset during a rebuild.
726 SXEmacs now has a libtool based build chain.
729 Bootstrapping packages is now a little more friendly and
730 foolproof (hopefully).
733 User cutomisations are now saved to
734 ~/.sxemacs/custom-${USER}.el if the old style custom.el
738 custom-defines.el files. These are like
739 auto-autoload.el files, but for defcustom's etc.
742 Support for :inherit face keyword.
745 A new rc.d style init mechanism. (the normal
746 ~/.sxemacs/init.el is still supported of course)
749 New resize echo area. (not to be confused with
753 #'describe-function now reports global keybindings for
757 New %b spec for #'format for converting between ints and
761 Various minor doc fixes, typos, and other trivial
768 <em>SXEmacs switches to GPLv3</em>
770 Most of the source code in SXEmacs is licenced under the
771 GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Today SXEmacs switched
772 to the latest version of the GPL, GPLv3.
777 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.7 "De Lorean" has been released!</em>
779 <u>22.1.7 Highlights</u>
783 Bugs closed in this release: 13, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28,
784 31 (see <a href="https://issues.sxemacs.org/">issue tracker</a>)
787 Much reworking of the build chain. Quite a bit has
788 changed here, a few options have been changed, added, or
789 removed. So if you haven't been following the
790 development it might pay you to have a look at our
791 configure's --help output.
794 Fix emodule loading on 64bit machines.
797 Security fix in movemail.c (mktemp()->mkstemp()).
800 Etags synched up to upstream 17.32.
803 Updates/fixes to dllists/skiplists.
806 Lots of updates in the ENT area (Enhanced Number
807 Types). Some stuff has been moved to an external
808 emodule, "ASE" (Algebraic Structures for ENT or "ASE
809 Supersedes ENT"). Also directed graphs have been
810 introduced (sparse representation only so far). And
811 introduce heaps (dense, dynamic, and week).
814 cl.el meets C. We've begun work on implementing the
815 common lisp macros as an external emodule. The main
816 focus here is speed, and initial benchmarks are _very_
817 exciting... The emod version of #'dotimes (#'cl:dotimes)
818 can be nearly 200 times faster than its elisp
819 counterpart! This isn't finished yet, but watch future
823 package-suppress mechanism ported from XEmacs 21.5.
826 Asynchronous version of #'curl:download added called
827 #'curl:download&.
830 Font-lock improvements, especially on TTYs.
833 Fix info search path.
836 Change default setting for progress guages to be off.
839 Multimedia updates/fixes. Lots of reworking has been
840 done here, especially with PulseAudio, ffmpeg, and
841 threading of the audio jobs etc. Support for gstreamer
842 and xine has been dropped, and libmagic added.
845 New macro to define "toggle" variables
846 #'define-toggle-variable. I wouldn't normally list a
847 single new macro in this file, but this one deserves a
848 mention. It sets up toggle variables, including
849 #'turn-on-VAR, #'turn-off-VAR, and #'toggle-VAR. Very
853 Many many compiler warnings have been fixed. Almost all
854 byte-compiler warnings have been fixed in our build.
855 And a good deal of the warnings in the C code of a
856 standard build has been fixed as well.
862 A contrib directory has been added to the tree. So far
863 there are patches in there to pop3.el, smtpmail.el, and
864 starttls.el which takes advantage of some of SXEmacs'
865 cool native features like OpenSSL. Watch this space for
869 Documentation updates: sppm, lispref, tips, building,
870 processes, and internals manuals.
876 <em>SXEmacs Release Archive Mirror</em>
878 I'm very happy to announce that the kind folks at
879 <a href="http://www.planetmirror.com">Planet Mirror</a>
880 are providing mirroring service for us.
885 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.6 "Cadillac" has been released!</em>
887 <u>22.1.6 Highlights</u>
891 Enhanced Number Types (ENT) fixes and updates.
894 Multimedia fixes and updates.
897 New ffi-gcrypt.el bringing GnuPG's libgrypt bindings to
901 Line and column numbers in the modeline are now padded
902 for improved readability.
905 New skiplists. This is a basic implementation of
906 Pugh's skip lists. Their efficiency is overwhelming
907 when compared to alists or plists. They also perform
908 better on insertion and removal than large hash-tables
909 (due to the resizing/rehashing which takes place).
910 They can be created almost as fast as lisp lists and
911 thus beat hash-tables there, too.
914 Module (DSO) load paths were fixed.
917 Test suite improvements and updates.
920 Etags fixes. The Makefile Etags targets work now and
921 etags.el has been fixed to work with the include
922 directive and tags completion is working.
925 Fix a problem with raw string parsing.
928 Sync bytecomp-runtime.el with XE 21.5 to take advantage
929 of the *-f?boundp macros.
932 OpenSSL updates/fixes/improvements, providing support
933 for certificate authorities (CA), for peer certificates
934 and, using the network-server-streams, secure listening
935 sockets. This will allow to connect/accept to/from
936 servers/clients which require valid peer certificates.
939 New PulseAudio support replacing PolypAudio.
942 New caching compiled regular expressions.
945 Fix many build related issues.
948 Major restructuring of the build chain. SXEmacs is now
949 a completely autotooled project, using aclocal,
950 automake, autoheader, autoconf.
953 Move to a FHS-compliant install hierarchy.
956 Drag 'n' Drop has been removed.
959 Fix bug in lib-complete that was causing find-function
960 to visit .elc files if running inplace.
963 Fix stack overflow bug in mapconcat.
966 Update about.el, see: <code>M-x about-sxemacs</code>.
969 Lots of documentation updates, fixes, and improvements.
975 <em>The documentation is now online</em>
977 As of today, the <strong>127278</strong> lines of
978 documentation that comes with SXEmacs is available for
979 browsing online. You'll see a link in the menu on each
985 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.5 "Bugatti" has been released!</em>
987 There were a few build-related problems with the last
988 release so this is primarily a maintenence/bugfix release.
991 <u>22.1.5 Highlights</u>
995 version.sh was sometimes generating an incorrect
999 Autoconf fixes and updates. Most of the changes in this
1000 release were centered around our autoconf scripts.
1002 <dd>- Recognise $CFLAGS environment variables</dd>
1003 <dd>- X toolkit autodetection redone</dd>
1004 <dd>- TTY autodetection fixed</dd>
1005 <dd>- PostgreSQL detection properly reported</dd>
1006 <dd>- Change allowed values for menubars, dialogs,
1010 <dd>menubars -- no athena or motif</dd>
1011 <dd>dialogs -- no lucid</dd>
1012 <dd>widgets -- no lucid</dd>
1016 - Set configure's "bugreport address" to
1017 https://issues.sxemacs.org.
1019 <dd>- Fix gdbm/berkdb detection</dd>
1020 <dd>- Improve libc version detection</dd>
1024 New convenience Makefile target, "build-report". This
1025 target is especially designed to make life easier for
1026 sending in build reports. Basically it saves make
1027 output to the appropriate place and also ensures that a
1031 A SELinux/libffi quirk and a GMP/mpfr issue has been
1035 A pdump/ENT bug on *BSD has been fixed.
1041 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.4 "Bentley Turbo" has been released!</em>
1043 <u>22.1.4 Highlights</u>
1047 Server sockets! Welcome to the brave new world of
1048 SXEmacs listening for TCP and UDP connections, with all
1049 the fix-ins for creating network servers. Yes, now you
1050 can have SXEmacs be your web server. See
1051 `open-network-server-stream'.
1054 SXEmacs audio. SXEmacs supports several "sound servers"
1055 like: OSS, NAS, ESD, Polypaudio, ALSA, aRts, and Jack.
1056 And media streams can be handled by sndfile, ffmpeg,
1057 sox, mad, xine, gstreamer. The SXEmacs developers
1058 recommend Polyp/ffmpeg whenever possible. And yes,
1059 SXEmacs <u>can</u> play mp3 files. :-)
1062 Autoconf updates. The big one here is that all enable
1063 and disable options have been converted to with and
1067 A recursive implementation of `directory-files', called
1068 `directory-files-recur' has been added. It is lightning
1069 fast... in some situations, even faster than find(1)
1072 Double linked lists and bloom filters have been
1076 OpenSSL digest, encryption, and decryption routines have
1077 been added for files. Previously this could only be
1081 Athena is now the default toolkit used instead of
1085 Embeddable keyboard macros. You can execute a keyboard
1086 macro while you are in the middle of defining a keyboard
1090 Mule is on by default. You can turn it off using the
1091 --without-mule configure option.
1094 Display any image format that is supported by
1095 ImageMagick's libWand. Requires FFI-enabled SXEmacs and
1099 Lots of updates and improvements to ENT (Enhanced Number
1103 Build report updates. The SXEmacs version no longer
1104 conflicts with the XEmacs build.el. It also displays a
1105 lot more interesting info. And can even use Gnus to
1109 `report-sxemacs-bug' now directs people to the SXEmacs
1111 <a href="https://issues.sxemacs.org/">https://issues.sxemacs.org/</a>
1114 SXEmacs now builds clean on FreeBSD and NetBSD.
1121 This news page is now also published as a
1122 <a href="rss/news.rss">RSS feed</a>.
1128 SXEmacs web site finally gets some content that doesn't leave
1129 you wondering what the hell this SXEmacs thing is anyway.
1130 Also, as you can see, the news items are now on their own
1131 page. And we've created an RSS feed to the commit logs to the
1132 mainline repo. There's a link in the menu of each page.
1138 There's a problem with SXEmacs 22.1.3 and installing on BSD
1139 systems. A virtually empty auto-autoloads.el file was being
1140 installed which made SXEmacs unusable. This tiny
1141 <a href="http://ftp.sxemacs.org/pub/sxemacs/sxemacs-22.1.3-bsdfix.diff">patch</a>
1145 We are also aware of some problems with building on Solaris 9.
1146 We are working on fixing those problems and will post a patch
1147 as soon as it is ready.
1153 Has it really been <u>that</u> long since the last bit of news
1154 or release? We have a new release! And just in time for
1157 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.3 has been released!</em>
1159 <u>22.1.3 Highlights</u>
1163 Enhanced number types -- SXEmacs now has all sorts
1164 of enhanced number types. Things like bignum,
1165 bigfloat, fractions, mpfr-floats, complex-numbers,
1166 gaussian-numbers, residue classes and residue
1170 Raw Strings -- SXEmacs supports Python-like raw
1171 strings. This will cut back dramatically on the
1172 backslashitis that elisp hackers suffer from.
1175 FFI -- Downloading HTTP headers is now possible,
1176 and FTP transfers have been fixed.
1179 Mouse -- You can now bind up to 32 mouse buttons.
1181 (global-set-key [(button32)] 'some-function)
1183 And you thought you had enough trouble trying to
1184 remember all the key bindings... :-)
1187 Uptime -- Try <code>M-x uptime</code> and
1188 <code>C-u M-x uptime</code>
1191 Bootstrapping PUI -- SXEmacs no longer needs to
1192 have any packages pre-installed before the package
1193 tools (PUI) are usable. As long as you have a
1194 FFI-enabled SXEmacs and libcurl (very likely) you
1195 can "bootstrap" PUI by choosing a download site
1196 and running <code>M-x pui-bootstrap</code>
1199 Improved font-locking in a TTY -- To illustrate,
1200 fire up a vanilla SXEmacs (sxemacs -vanilla) and
1201 look at the modeline. Then open a .c file and
1202 turn on font-lock (M-x font-lock-mode).
1205 Autoconf fixes -- All configure options have help
1206 strings and state what the default setting is.
1207 PostgreSQL detection has been improved and
1208 simplified. Most users shouldn't need to specify
1209 the pgsql prefix in `--with-site-prefixes' to get
1213 Building SXEmacs with C++ Compiler -- This is no
1214 longer supported. To build SXEmacs you will need
1215 an ANSI-compatible C compiler of at least GCC
1219 Documentation (Texinfo) -- Have all been updated
1220 to mention "SXEmacs" instead of "XEmacs" where
1221 appropriate. The main SXEmacs manual is now
1229 Wow, it's been a while since I updated this page. Sorry 'bout
1230 that. My excuse is that I hate doing HTML and I'm a lazy
1231 bastard. Anyway, a lot's been going on since, most notably:
1233 <em>SXEmacs 22.1.2 has been released!</em>
1235 <u>22.1.2 Highlights</u>
1239 FFI -- This is our "Foreign Function Interface". In a
1240 nutshell, it is a way to bring any function from any
1241 external library to lisp. As an example, this version
1242 of SXEmacs can download files from the internet
1243 <u>without</u> the need for any XEmacs lisp packages
1244 such as EFS. It uses libcurl. Note that libcurl is
1245 <u>not</u> needed to build SXEmacs.
1248 OpenSSL -- SXEmacs can be linked with OpenSSL
1249 libcrypto and libssl to provide a comprehensive
1250 gateway to cryptographic and related functions.
1251 Note, this is still experimental.
1254 GC -- Garbage Collection. SXEmacs still garbage
1255 collects as much as it always had, it is just now it
1256 doesn't print messages to the echo area as often as
1260 Autoconf -- The SXEmacs autoconf scripts are all
1261 autoconf version 2.59 compatible.
1264 Etags -- Updated to upstream version 17.11 of
1268 Win32 -- Most of the win32 code is now gone.
1271 Security -- A potential vulnerability has been fixed
1279 Added "Developer Pages" section.
1285 Our BugZilla issue tracker is now online and ready for use
1286 (see the link in the menu). It's actually been operational
1287 for a while but I forgot to mention it. :-)
1293 We now have Autoconf 2.59 compatible configuration scripts.
1294 The preliminary work is in sxemacs--main--22.1.2--patch-3 (see
1295 the <a href="download.html">download page</a> for how to get
1299 Take care with it. Many of the configure options have
1300 changed. And at this stage, we are expecting breakage as
1301 it is very difficult to test all configurations.
1307 It is with great pride and pleasure that the SXEmacs Team
1308 brings you another SXEmacs release.
1311 Today, SXEmacs 22.1.1 was released. Source tarballs are
1313 <a href="download.html">download page</a>. And you can
1314 view the changes in this release
1315 <a href="changes/ChangeLog-22.1.1"> here</a>.
1321 With thanks to the wonderful folks at
1322 <a href="http://www.tux.org/"> Tux.Org</a>, I am very pleased
1323 to announce that we now have an FTP site! Check it out:
1324 <a href="ftp://ftp.sxemacs.org/pub/sxemacs/">ftp.sxemacs.org</a>
1330 The sxemacs-devel mailing list is now available via Gmane.
1331 This is great because it means less load on my mail server.
1332 There is a downside (from my point of view) however. I can
1333 no longer keep accurate records of numbers of developers
1337 If you want to be "counted" as a SXEmacs developer,
1338 could you please subscribe to the list in the normal
1339 way. If you'd rather read/post via Gmane, that's cool,
1340 just mark your "real" subscription as "no delivery".
1345 Let me introduce you to our core team:
1347 <li>Steve Youngs (Project Lead)</li>
1348 <li>Erik Arneson</li>
1349 <li><a href="people/lg.html">Evgeny Zajcev</a></li>
1350 <li>Hynek Schlawack</li>
1351 <li>Nick Granado</li>
1352 <li>Peter Brown</li>
1353 <li><a href="people/hroptatyr.html">Sebastian Freundt</a></li>
1360 Today, SXEmacs was announced to the world on the XEmacs and
1361 GNU/Emacs mailing lists. See the
1362 <a href="list-archives/html/sxemacs-devel/2004-12/msg00065.html">original post</a>.
1365 <!--#include virtual="/templates/copyright.template" -->
1366 <!--#include virtual="/templates/stats.template" -->
1367 <!--#include virtual="/templates/footer.template" -->