Dear GAP Forum,
we are distributing the announcement below which is primarily addressed
to package authors (existing or prospective), but certainly constitutes
an interest for a wider audience of GAP users. If you have a GAP package
in preparation or if you would like to have a preview of the new version
of GAP, you are welcome to download, install and test the beta release of
GAP 4.5.
Please be aware of the following WARNING: this is a beta version which
still contains some work in progress and also contains some bugs which
will be fixed in the coming official release, so usual care should be
taken, as reasonably expected while working with a beta version of any
software.
Best wishes,
Alexander Konovalov
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
ANNOUNCEMENT
of the Beta release of GAP 4.5 for package authors
Dear GAP Forum,
There have been many changes in the development version of GAP during the more
than two years since the release of GAP 4.4.12. Some major developments that
were started earlier are now ready for release and it's now high time for the
GAP 4.5 release, which we plan to have later in 2011.
We have already prepared a first beta version of GAP 4.5, named GAP 4.5.1,
which is available in the archive
ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/gap4r5p1_2011_04_15-00_10.zip
in order to allow authors of GAP 4 packages to test their packages with the
new features and prepare them for the first official release of GAP 4.5. We
have already tested most of the current versions of GAP packages with the
beta-release of GAP 4.5, and did not find any serious problems. Thus, we hope
that for most packages the change will go smoothly. While the transition to
GAP 4.5 will not break existing GAP code we encouraged package authors to
make some adjustments in the setup and the documentation of packages to use
some of the new features of the GAP 4.5 package interface.
If you are currently working on a new GAP package which you plan to release
soon, or if you are simply interested in a preview of a new version of GAP,
you are welcome to download, install and test GAP 4.5.1. You will notice
that its archive is not quite the same as the GAP 4.4 archives. For the
general release of GAP 4.5 (and subsequent updates) we plan the main form
of distribution of GAP to be a single dated archive file including current
versions of all packages. Some of the packages that are loaded at the
beginning of the GAP session currently produce errors; these may be ignored
at the moment unless you need those particular packages, and should be
eventually eliminated after relevant package updates.
This archive does not include binaries so you will need to compile the GAP
kernel yourself. There are now additional configure options available to
specify the usage of the external GMP and readline libraries and the build
mode, which are documented in the Chapter "Installing GAP" of the Reference
manual, available also at
ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/install.pdf
To run GAP under Windows, you may either compile it yourself with Cygwin or
download Windows binaries in the archive
http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~alexk/gap/gap4r5p1winbin.zip
It has two subdirectories, "gap4r5/bin" and "gap4r5/terminfo". You should
unpack it from the same place where you've previously unpacked 4.5.1 so the
content of 'bin' will go to the existing 'gap4r5/bin' directory and a new
subdirectory 'terminfo' will be created in 'gap4r5'.
In addition, the file
http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~alexk/gap/gap45beta.txt
contains further notes for package authors about building GAP 4.5 beta with
GMP on Mac OS X and may be extended with other relevant information in the
future.
The document
ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/gap45beta.pdf
contains, in addition to the information included in this message, a more
detailed announcement of GAP 4.5.1 with a brief overview of main changes in
GAP 4.5 from the package author's perspective, descriptions of known problems
that we observed while testing current packages with GAP 4.5, and some further
guidelines. For your convenience, the text of the announcement is duplicated
in the temporary preface of the reference manual for GAP 4.5.1, from where you
may follow hyperlinks to appropriate manual sections.
We welcome all feedback to supp...@gap-system.org including comments,
suggestions, bug reports and manual corrections.
Best wishes,
the GAP development team
_______________________________________________
Forum mailing list
Forum@mail.gap-system.org
http://mail.gap-system.org/mailman/listinfo/forum
