3.7-7 "final" VM for Unix - Vm-dev

20 Mar 2005


      Unix Hackers,
I am pleased (and relieved) to announce the "final" 3.7-7 VM for Unix.
This VM is very close to 3.7b-5 (which has been working well for many
people for some time) with the addition of several critical fixes.
Archives are in the usual place (http://squeak.hpl.hp.com/unix) for
sources and a few pre-compiled binaries:
Darwin 7.8   PowerPC
   Mac OS X     PowerPC
   FreeBSD 4.10 i386
   NetBSD 1.6.1 i386
   OpenBSD 3.4  i386
   Solaris 2.9  i386
   Solaris 2.9  Sparc
   GNU/Linux    PowerPC
   GNU/Linux    i686
(.rpms and .debs will follow shortly.  Due to limited physical access
to machines I have only been able to test this release on Darwin-PPC,
MacOSX-PPC, and GNU/Linux-i686.)
If you prefer to fetch the sources from our Subversion repository:
svn export http://squeak.hpl.hp.com/svn/squeak/tags/unix-3.7-7
(The repository source now includes everything needed to build the
Unix VM.  No more guessing which magical combination of image-side
stuff is needed to generate a working Interpreter and plugins.  FWIW,
the generated sources used in this release are those found in the
released "final" 3.7-5898-full image [following my usual rule] plus
[exceptionally] Ned's "2GB oop" patches, which are included in the
'unix/misc' directory of both the source archive and repository.)
Enjoy!
Ian
PS:  A small reminder.  Please send VM-related problems/bugs/fixes to
      the VM-Dev list (see discuss.squeakfoundation.org).  VM-related
      posts to the general-purpose squeak-dev list are not guaranteed
      to be seen, let alone acted upon, by the relevant people.
If you're sending me Unix-specific VM fixes, please send *entire*
      modified files (not 'diffs', of any flavour) since I read and
      manually apply all patches, one line at a time, using ediff in
      Emacs.  Fixes should usually be sent to me directly (ian [point]
      piumarta [chez] squeakland [point] org) and not copied to any
      mailing list, *please*.  (Partly traffic, but mostly to keep my
      remaining 'uncompromised' email addresses out of
      publicly-archived lists.)  Thanks!
PPS: Here are the release notes (relative to the 3.6 stable release)
      for anyone interested...
VM:
Netscape plugin understands "imageName" and "failureURL" attributes
   in <embed ...> tags.
Less noise from dlopen() and friends when probing for plugins.
Problems preventing more than one external plugin from loading in
   Mac OS X fixed.
Obscure bug fixed that prevented socket options being set on some
   platforms.
NPSqueak improvements and bug fixes from Bert Freudenberg and Jens
   Lincke.  New environment variable SQUEAK_USERDIR used to find plugin
   image; defaults to 'My Squeak'.  (NPS may not work for users of
   shells other than bash.  Contact Bert if you have problems.)
Interpreter changes from Ned Konz that avoid image segment loading
   errors caused by oops >= 2GB.
VM drivers:
Drag-and-drop support added to the X11 display driver.
vm-sound-NAS driver explicitly depends on libaudio.
New option '-glxdebug <n>' sets OpenGL debug message level for X11 
display.
Plugins:
Additional checks for external data in SocketPlugin.
New OSProcessPlugin (including XDpyPlg and AioPlg).
Build:
Optimisation flags default to '-O' if compiler not recognised.
sqGnu.h asm() statements fixed for gcc-3.1 compatibility.
Use of alloca() made more portable.
SVN repository now includes contents of 'src' directory used to
   build Unix binaries.  No more endless searching for the right
   combination of obscure VMM version and image updates.
Build instructions updated for SVN and recent organisational
   changes.
'gnuify' inserts a #error into gnu-interp.c if it detects a problem
   (causing cpp to barf cleanly with a comprehensible error message,
   rather than leaving the compiler to spew hundreds of obscure error
   messages).
Documentation:
URIs updated to reflect recent organisational changes.