Hey Man, What's the buzz?

2008-06-06

22.1.9 Highlights

• Bugs closed in this release: 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62. See our Issue Tracker for the details.
• New garbage collector BDWGC. SXEmacs can now use the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector. It is still experimental at this stage and there are known bugs (memory leak). If you have plenty of RAM it is quite usable, and noticably faster than non-BDWGC SXEmacsen. This new feature is not on by default. To get it, configure with --with-experimental-features=all.
• Support 256 colour terminals. Support for 256 colour terminals and colour resolution through approximation for tty devices.
• New function, #'mapfam. This new function is an extrememly powerful replacement for _all_ of the current map functions. It not only can do the job of the existing map functions, but can also convert any sequence to any other sequence. Lots of other cool features as well, see its doc string for full details.
• New FFI util, ffi-magic.el. Uses libmagic to guess file type.
• Cool new stuff in the contrib directory. There are tla hook scripts, build scripts, and build-report scripts.
• Build chain fixes and improvements. Better detection of ALSA, ffmpeg, libffi, libbind, and many other various bits and pieces. General build related fixes were made for MacOS, Solaris, HPUX, and of course, Linux.
• Init file migration code removed. We feel that it is better to NOT mess with other emacsen's set ups.
• Compiler warning fixes.
• PNG images optimised for size.
• Re-work auto-autoloads loading a little. Priority is given to packages installed under ~/.sxemacs/ and care is taken to eliminate those "foo-autoloads already loaded" warnings.
• Support for BSD's MP removed.
• Emodule search path/loading fixes. Emodule load path has been made sane. #'load-module and #'locate-module have both been vastly improved and both have completion.
• FFI improvements. The FFI code has been improved so that it can be compatible with XEmacs 21.5 for when they merge our FFI into their code base. Also #'ffi-load and #'ffi-load-library no longer need to be given a file extension as part of the arg to allow for different platforms having different shlib extensions. Also, some UI enhancements were added to ffi-curl.el and ffi-taglib.el.
• Etags improvements. A bit of "UI" has been added to etags.el, as well as some code optimising.

2008-02-01

22.1.8 Highlights

• Bugs closed in this release: 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31. The reason for the apparent double up of closed bugs from the previous release is because our bug index got reset during a rebuild.
• SXEmacs now has a libtool based build chain.
• Bootstrapping packages is now a little more friendly and foolproof (hopefully).
• User cutomisations are now saved to ~/.sxemacs/custom-${USER}.el if the old style custom.el doesn't exist.
• custom-defines.el files. These are like auto-autoload.el files, but for defcustom's etc.
• Support for :inherit face keyword.
• A new rc.d style init mechanism. (the normal ~/.sxemacs/init.el is still supported of course)
• New resize echo area. (not to be confused with rsz-minibuffer.el)
• #'describe-function now reports global keybindings for commands.
• New %b spec for #'format for converting between ints and bit vectors.
• Various minor doc fixes, typos, and other trivial things.

2007-11-27

Most of the source code in SXEmacs is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Today SXEmacs switched to the latest version of the GPL, GPLv3.

2007-08-24

22.1.7 Highlights

• Bugs closed in this release: 13, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31 (see issue tracker)
• Much reworking of the build chain. Quite a bit has changed here, a few options have been changed, added, or removed. So if you haven't been following the development it might pay you to have a look at our configure's --help output.
• Fix emodule loading on 64bit machines.
• Security fix in movemail.c (mktemp()->mkstemp()).
• Etags synched up to upstream 17.32.
• Updates/fixes to dllists/skiplists.
• Lots of updates in the ENT area (Enhanced Number Types). Some stuff has been moved to an external emodule, "ASE" (Algebraic Structures for ENT or "ASE Supersedes ENT"). Also directed graphs have been introduced (sparse representation only so far). And introduce heaps (dense, dynamic, and week).
• cl.el meets C. We've begun work on implementing the common lisp macros as an external emodule. The main focus here is speed, and initial benchmarks are _very_ exciting... The emod version of #'dotimes (#'cl:dotimes) can be nearly 200 times faster than its elisp counterpart! This isn't finished yet, but watch future releases.
• package-suppress mechanism ported from XEmacs 21.5.
• Asynchronous version of #'curl:download added called #'curl:download&.
• Font-lock improvements, especially on TTYs.
• Fix info search path.
• Change default setting for progress guages to be off.
• Multimedia updates/fixes. Lots of reworking has been done here, especially with PulseAudio, ffmpeg, and threading of the audio jobs etc. Support for gstreamer and xine has been dropped, and libmagic added.
• New macro to define "toggle" variables #'define-toggle-variable. I wouldn't normally list a single new macro in this file, but this one deserves a mention. It sets up toggle variables, including #'turn-on-VAR, #'turn-off-VAR, and #'toggle-VAR. Very nifty.
• Many many compiler warnings have been fixed. Almost all byte-compiler warnings have been fixed in our build. And a good deal of the warnings in the C code of a standard build has been fixed as well.
• GC fixes/updates.
• A contrib directory has been added to the tree. So far there are patches in there to pop3.el, smtpmail.el, and starttls.el which takes advantage of some of SXEmacs' cool native features like OpenSSL. Watch this space for more nifty things.
• Documentation updates: sppm, lispref, tips, building, processes, and internals manuals.

2006-12-11

I'm very happy to announce that the kind folks at Planet Mirror are providing mirroring service for us.

2006-12-06

22.1.6 Highlights

• Enhanced Number Types (ENT) fixes and updates.
• Multimedia fixes and updates.
• New ffi-gcrypt.el bringing GnuPG's libgrypt bindings to SXEmacs.
• Line and column numbers in the modeline are now padded for improved readability.
• New skiplists. This is a basic implementation of Pugh's skip lists. Their efficiency is overwhelming when compared to alists or plists. They also perform better on insertion and removal than large hash-tables (due to the resizing/rehashing which takes place). They can be created almost as fast as lisp lists and thus beat hash-tables there, too.
• Module (DSO) load paths were fixed.
• Test suite improvements and updates.
• Etags fixes. The Makefile Etags targets work now and etags.el has been fixed to work with the include directive and tags completion is working.
• Fix a problem with raw string parsing.
• Sync bytecomp-runtime.el with XE 21.5 to take advantage of the *-f?boundp macros.
• OpenSSL updates/fixes/improvements, providing support for certificate authorities (CA), for peer certificates and, using the network-server-streams, secure listening sockets. This will allow to connect/accept to/from servers/clients which require valid peer certificates.
• New PulseAudio support replacing PolypAudio.
• New caching compiled regular expressions.
• Fix many build related issues.
• Major restructuring of the build chain. SXEmacs is now a completely autotooled project, using aclocal, automake, autoheader, autoconf.
• Move to a FHS-compliant install hierarchy.
• Drag 'n' Drop has been removed.
• Fix bug in lib-complete that was causing find-function to visit .elc files if running inplace.
• Fix stack overflow bug in mapconcat.
• Update about.el, see: M-x about-sxemacs.
• Lots of documentation updates, fixes, and improvements.

2006-05-13

As of today, the 127278 lines of documentation that comes with SXEmacs is available for browsing online. You'll see a link in the menu on each page here.

2006-05-07

There were a few build-related problems with the last release so this is primarily a maintenence/bugfix release.

22.1.5 Highlights

• version.sh was sometimes generating an incorrect version.
• Autoconf fixes and updates. Most of the changes in this release were centered around our autoconf scripts.

  - Recognise $CFLAGS environment variables

  - X toolkit autodetection redone

  - TTY autodetection fixed

  - PostgreSQL detection properly reported

  - Change allowed values for menubars, dialogs, widgets

  menubars -- no athena or motif

  dialogs -- no lucid

  widgets -- no lucid

  - Set configure's "bugreport aliress" to http://issues.sxemacs.org.

  - Fix gdbm/berkdb detection

  - Improve libc version detection

• New convenience Makefile target, "build-report". This target is especially designed to make life easier for sending in build reports. Basically it saves make output to the appropriate place and also ensures that a make check is run.
• A SELinux/libffi quirk and a GMP/mpfr issue has been noted in PROBLEMS.
• A pdump/ENT bug on *BSD has been fixed.

2006-05-01

22.1.4 Highlights

• Server sockets! Welcome to the brave new world of SXEmacs listening for TCP and UDP connections, with all the fix-ins for creating network servers. Yes, now you can have SXEmacs be your web server. See `open-network-server-stream'.
• SXEmacs audio. SXEmacs supports several "sound servers" like: OSS, NAS, ESD, Polypaudio, ALSA, aRts, and Jack. And media streams can be handled by sndfile, ffmpeg, sox, mad, xine, gstreamer. The SXEmacs developers recommend Polyp/ffmpeg whenever possible. And yes, SXEmacs can play mp3 files. :-)
• Autoconf updates. The big one here is that all enable and disable options have been converted to with and without options.
• A recursive implementation of `directory-files', called `directory-files-recur' has been added. It is lightning fast... in some situations, even faster than find(1)
• Double linked lists and bloom filters have been implemented.
• OpenSSL digest, encryption, and decryption routines have been added for files. Previously this could only be done with buffers.
• Athena is now the default toolkit used instead of Motif.
• Embeddable keyboard macros. You can execute a keyboard macro while you are in the middle of defining a keyboard macro.
• Mule is on by default. You can turn it off using the --without-mule configure option.
• Display any image format that is supported by ImageMagick's libWand. Requires FFI-enabled SXEmacs and libWand.
• Lots of updates and improvements to ENT (Enhanced Number Types).
• Build report updates. The SXEmacs version no longer conflicts with the XEmacs build.el. It also displays a lot more interesting info. And can even use Gnus to send the reports.
• `report-sxemacs-bug' now directs people to the SXEmacs issue tracker at http://issues.sxemacs.org/
• SXEmacs now builds clean on FreeBSD and NetBSD.

2006-04-11

This news page is now also published as a RSS feed.

2006-02-13

SXEmacs web site finally gets some content that doesn't leave you wondering what the hell this SXEmacs thing is anyway. Also, as you can see, the news items are now on their own page. And we've created an RSS feed to the commit logs to the mainline repo. There's a link in the menu of each page.

2006-01-08

There's a problem with SXEmacs 22.1.3 and installing on BSD systems. A virtually empty auto-autoloads.el file was being installed which made SXEmacs unusable. This tiny patch fixes it.

We are also aware of some problems with building on Solaris 9. We are working on fixing those problems and will post a patch as soon as it is ready.

2005-12-22

Has it really been that long since the last bit of news or release? We have a new release! And just in time for Christmas, too. :-)

22.1.3 Highlights

• Enhanced number types -- SXEmacs now has all sorts of enhanced number types. Things like bignum, bigfloat, fractions, mpfr-floats, complex-numbers, gaussian-numbers, residue classes and residue class rings.
• Raw Strings -- SXEmacs supports Python-like raw strings. This will cut back dramatically on the backslashitis that elisp hackers suffer from.
• FFI -- Downloading HTTP headers is now possible, and FTP transfers have been fixed.
• Mouse -- You can now bind up to 32 mouse buttons. (global-set-key [(button32)] 'some-function) And you thought you had enough trouble trying to remember all the key bindings... :-)
• Uptime -- Try M-x uptime and C-u M-x uptime
• Bootstrapping PUI -- SXEmacs no longer needs to have any packages pre-installed before the package tools (PUI) are usable. As long as you have a FFI-enabled SXEmacs and libcurl (very likely) you can "bootstrap" PUI by choosing a download site and running M-x pui-bootstrap
• Improved font-locking in a TTY -- To illustrate, fire up a vanilla SXEmacs (sxemacs -vanilla) and look at the modeline. Then open a .c file and turn on font-lock (M-x font-lock-mode).
• Autoconf fixes -- All configure options have help strings and state what the default setting is. PostgreSQL detection has been improved and simplified. Most users shouldn't need to specify the pgsql prefix in `--with-site-prefixes' to get PostgreSQL support.
• Building SXEmacs with C++ Compiler -- This is no longer supported. To build SXEmacs you will need an ANSI-compatible C compiler of at least GCC 2.95.3 equivalence.
• Documentation (Texinfo) -- Have all been updated to mention "SXEmacs" instead of "XEmacs" where appropriate. The main SXEmacs manual is now sxemacs.info.

2005-05-18

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this page. Sorry 'bout that. My excuse is that I hate doing HTML and I'm a lazy bastard. Anyway, a lot's been going on since, most notably:

22.1.2 Highlights

• FFI -- This is our "Foreign Function Interface". In a nutshell, it is a way to bring any function from any external library to lisp. As an example, this version of SXEmacs can download files from the internet without the need for any XEmacs lisp packages such as EFS. It uses libcurl. Note that libcurl is not needed to build SXEmacs.
• OpenSSL -- SXEmacs can be linked with OpenSSL libcrypto and libssl to provide a comprehensive gateway to cryptographic and related functions. Note, this is still experimental.
• GC -- Garbage Collection. SXEmacs still garbage collects as much as it always had, it is just now it doesn't print messages to the echo area as often as it used to.
• Autoconf -- The SXEmacs autoconf scripts are all autoconf version 2.59 compatible.
• Etags -- Updated to upstream version 17.11 of etags.c
• Win32 -- Most of the win32 code is now gone.
• Security -- A potential vulnerability has been fixed in movemail.c

2005-02-20

Added "Developer Pages" section.

2005-02-18

Our BugZilla issue tracker is now online and ready for use (see the link in the menu). It's actually been operational for a while but I forgot to mention it. :-)

2005-02-03

We now have Autoconf 2.59 compatible configuration scripts. The preliminary work is in sxemacs--main--22.1.2--patch-3 (see the download page for how to get this via tla).

Take care with it. Many of the configure options have changed. And at this stage, we are expecting breakage as it is very difficult to test all configurations.

2005-01-31

It is with great pride and pleasure that the SXEmacs Team brings you another SXEmacs release.

Today, SXEmacs 22.1.1 was released. Source tarballs are available from our download page. And you can view the changes in this release here.

2005-01-12

With thanks to the wonderful folks at Tux.Org, I am very pleased to announce that we now have an FTP site! Check it out: ftp.sxemacs.org

2005-01-05

The sxemacs-devel mailing list is now available via Gmane. This is great because it means less load on my mail server. There is a downside (from my point of view) however. I can no longer keep accurate records of numbers of developers etc. So...

If you want to be "counted" as a SXEmacs developer, could you please subscribe to the list in the normal way. If you'd rather read/post via Gmane, that's cool, just mark your "real" subscription as "no delivery".

2005-01-02

• Steve Youngs (Project Lead)
• Erik Arneson
• Evgeny Zajcev
• Hynek Schlawack
• Nick Granado
• Peter Brown
• Sebastian Freundt

2004-12-31

Today, SXEmacs was announced to the world on the XEmacs and GNU/Emacs mailing lists. See the original post.