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First non-beta release of ICI 4

Well, I've finally got ICI version 4 into a state that
I think can be called released.

It's taken ages because I wanted to get the C API into
to a position where it would be stable for a long time
to come. Both at the source and binary level. (There's
a bit of editing required to upgrade from 3 to 4.
I wanted to make sure it didn't need to happen again.)

Most of the interesting changes I've mailed out about
before. If you read through the sample programs in the
updated manual you'll see a few even newer things.

Over xmas I managed to get lots of things fixed and
finalised (at least to the extent that remaining work
won't break anything).

The core is now much better tested. The regression tests
now execute every line of code you can reasonably reach
from a script.

The PDF document it now *much* better. It has a small
tutorial, sample programs, is up-to-date, and even has
the start of documentation on the C API. (I'm still
adding that.)

The core is also faster and smaller.

There are easy-to-install Windows binary distributions.

The releases are at SourceForge.

The rough areas are:

* UNIX-like system builds: I think the linux and Solaris
builds are OK. But the FreeBSD package stuff needs
some updating yet. Andy will mail out soon when the OSX
build is upated. Other systems I've hardly touched.

* This is really only a core release. The sys, net, and xml
extension modules have been converted to ici4 (you can use
them as examples). But that's all. You can run
'makemake.ici' in the ici-modules checkout to make
Makefiles for those modules.

* The man pages have been broken up, but are not yet updated
with ici4 features.

There is a script 'ici34check.ici' that you can run to
to get a listing of things to change (or check) to upgrade
your C source from version 3 to version 4.

There's a heap of other stuff I could mention. But it's
probably best to either read the CHANGELOG, or the PDF
manual (or both).

Regards,

Tim.

Posted by Tim Long 2003-01-13

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