[GAP Forum] 2nd beta release of GAP 4.5

[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 second 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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Dear authors of GAP packages,

Earlier in April 2011 we made available the first beta release of GAP 4.5, 
and we appreciate all feedback we've received from package authors and users 
so far. In the subsequent period more than half of all packages have been 
either upgraded to work with GAP 4.5 or nearly completed the upgrade. Now, 
to allow you to test your packages with the recent changes, adjust package 
manuals and make the final step towards the official release of GAP 4.5, we 
have prepared the second beta version of GAP 4.5, named GAP 4.5.2, which is 
available to you in the following directory:

	ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/

Please download and install the archive 

ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/gap4r5p2_2011_09_21-16_00.zip

containing GAP 4.5.2 and test it with your package(s). You will need to 
compile the GAP kernel as usually, following the installation instructions 
which are now contained in the INSTALL file in the gap4r5 directory and 
also duplicated here:

	ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/INSTALL

To run GAP under Windows, you may either compile it yourself with Cygwin 
or download Windows binaries archive here:

	ftp://ftp.gap-system.org/pub/gap/gap45/beta/gap4r5p2winbin.zip

Unpack it and drop 'gap4r5/bin' and 'gap4r5/terminfo' directories into 
your GAP installation under Windows.

Besides various improvements and bugfixes, there are two essential changes 
between GAP 4.5.1 and GAP 4.5.2:

- the new version 1.4 of the GAPDoc package and new versions of gapmacro.tex 
and convert.pl files, using which you will need to rebuild package 
documentation to make it compatible with the GAP manual (as a side effect, 
links to the main GAP manual won't work for both GAP 4.4 and GAP 4.5 in 
the same version of the package).

- the new build setup. In particular, --with-abi=XX is replaced by ABI=XX, 
where XX is 32 or 64, and there is no more ABI-dependent subdirectory in 
the bin/<arch>. See the INSTALL file in the gap4r5 directory for further 
details. Also note that Mac OS X Lion users should compile GAP with 
'./configure --with-gmp=no ; make' because of the known problems which 
we should be able resolve before the public release of GAP 4.5.

These two aspects of the system -- the build process and making documentation 
-- are now in the form enough stable to offer you a reliable platform to 
prepare the new version of your package, which you are asked to provide before 
November 20th 2011. If you've already updated the package recently, all you 
will have to do is to rebuild the manual with the new version of GAPDoc 1.4 or 
with the new version of gapmacro.tex/convert.pl dependently on the format you 
are using for your manuals.

When you've done that, please make the new version available to us for testing
and notify Alexander Konovalov (alexk at mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk) about the location
of the relevant PackageInfo.g file to arrange for the GAP Group to obtain your
package for further tests. Note that if the new version of your package is
compatible with both GAP 4.4 and GAP 4.5 you need not to change the location
of the PackageInfo.g file. However, if the new version will require GAP 4.5,
please put in under different URL so it will not be picked up by the package
update scripts for GAP 4.4 which we will still continiue to run until the
official release of GAP 4.5. Again note that it's not possible for a package 
to have a manual which contains correct references to both GAP 4.4 and GAP 4.5 
main manuals.

If a package is released to us later than November 20th 2011 and our testing
shows any problems (most likely in interactions with other packages) we may
not be able to sort them out in time to include the new version in the first
official release of GAP 4.5. Therefore, early submission would be very much
appreciated. 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 - a
version of the package with basic compatibility with GAP 4.5 can be produced
with little or no effort, as for most packages simply recompiling the
documentation would be good enough. We would encourage you though, to do a
little more work and adjust your package to use some of the new features of
the GAP 4.5 package interface. This is especially important since some of the
changes involve improvements to the GAP package interface to deal with
problems which have arisen and cope more smoothly as the number of packages
approaches 100 and the complexity of the functionality supplied by packages
and the interaction between packages increases.

As well as testing your package, please let us know of any problems you find
with GAP 4.5 itself. We encourage you to test GAP 4.5 on as many
configurations as possible. We welcome all feedback to support at gap-system.org
including comments, suggestions, bug reports and manual corrections.

You will find a brief overview of main changes in GAP 4.5 from the package
author's perspective and further guidelines and checklists in the Appendix 
"Guidelines for Writing a GAP Package" of the Example package included in 
the second beta release.

Best wishes,

the GAP development team

September 2011

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