Charles Wright asks for advice whether they should at the present time
print a few more manuals for gap or rather wait for the release 3.2
that has been promised as coming soon for a while now.

While I cannot make the decision for them (and possibly others in a
similar situation), I want to report as honestly as possible about the
state of affairs. Gap 3.2 will indeed be released soon, but "soon"
may well mean another two to three weeks - as usual we underestimated
the time needed, I can only hope that we do not underestimate it again
now. The new version will contain quite a number of new routines, but
several will hardly show up in the manual since they either replace
old ones or are called by generic functions to do some job more
efficiently in some special case. This is for instance the case with
several algorithms for permutation groups. Extensions that will be
rather visible in the manual will e.g. concern the handling of
presentations, the introduction of polynomials as a new data type, and
a Dixon/Schneider for finding the charactertable of a concretely given
group. Of course we are also trying to eliminate mistakes and
shortcomings in the manual that we have become aware of.

So the question whether to print or to wait depends a little on what
area you are particularly interested in, what group of people you want
the manual for, and how urgently you need futher copies.

Joachim Neubueser