[Netrexx-develop] Releasing NetRexx 4.02

[René J. <rvj...@xs...>]

Dear developers,

I am releasing 4.02 today as an (not marked as such) release candidate. This because there is some work to be done that will disrupt the opportunity to release 4.02 with a limited change set.
It contains the improvements as signalled in the release notes:

NetRexx 4.02 GA [Januari 24, 2022]

- for building NetRexx 4.0.2, Java 8 is now the lowest supported version
- tested and buildable from Java 8 up to and including Java 19ea
- including a fix for building on Java >=18
- NetRexx option (no)annotate to turn off pass through annotations
- NetRexxC.jar and NetRexxF.jar now contain the ANT task for NetRexx
- The ANT task is modified for the new -annotations option
- The ANT task is modified for the new -address option
- ANT in the source code repository upgraded to 1.10 for building NetRexx
- a new chapter in the Programming Guide documenting two ANT scenarios
- new special word asknoecho to request console input without echo, e.g. for passwords
- NetRexx option MOD for generation of tailored source representations (Jason Martin)
- documentation additions and corrections (numerous)
- the base font for all documents is now an open source version of Times, due to font copyright issues

Pipeline additions, improvements:
- fix for arguments on command stage
- DIGEST stage (SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, MD2, MD5 and more).
- a small CMS-compatibility improvement for stage LITERAL (Jeff Hennick)
- a new pipr script that is guaranteed to work in a Docker container (Marc Remes)

Releasing it as a RC first leaves us with the option of recalling it when accidents happen, or do nothing when it is fine. It does not seem to contain high-risk issues like 4.01 - and that was very successful.
It will hit the website sometimes later today CET.

For NetRexx 5 I would like to focus on:

- solving the issue with output handles and multithreading that inhibits a well working JSR223 interface (René/Marc)
- a Streams implementation (closely related with the previous issue at the core, but also delivering a Classic Rexx compatible I/O model) (René/Marc)
- address enhancements (address with etc, integration with the OS Address package, outtrap): (Marc/René)
- CMS compatibility enhancements (if necessary; up to Jeff)
- command line versus .njp versus conformity (René)
- Android introduction, builds and examples (a lot, if not most work already done by Jason)
- fixing an issue with Annotations that is there but nobody noticed

I announced the move to Github at the 2021 Symposium, but it is not so bad as it sounds: the main repo will be at SourceForge for the time being, but I will maintain a shadow repo at Github. The issue list, however, will be at Github (we never got around to use the one at SourceForge, so I will use all the project/issue/kanban/discussion fora infra at Github. Thanks to Jason we have the complete list of open issues from when we needed to move away from project Kenai.

Please let me know your Github userid if I don’t know them yet. The ownership of the Github repo is with the RexxLA user, but I will mostly use my personal userid to do the work. If you are reading this list and are a ‘management/continuity’-user of the SF NetRexx repository, please be in touch to continue in this role, if you still want to do that.

Best regards,

René.