[GAP Forum] Beta release of GAP 4.5 for package authors

[Alexander Konovalov]

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


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                   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 support at gap-system.org including comments, 
suggestions, bug reports and manual corrections. 


Best wishes, 
the GAP development team