[MacPerl Announcement] MacPerl 5.2.0r4 Released

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

After a bit of last minute tweaks to the source code distribution (and a long
walk along the Sihl river today), MacPerl 5.2.0r4 is now ready for human
consumption.

A list of all changes is below; most of them concern interaction with the
Toolbox modules and with taint mode. If you're using just untainted text
processing scripts, the changes an upgrade would bring you are mostly cosmetic.

To address some of the concerns raised about binary distributions, I've started
adding separate PGP signatures to the archives, so you can verify that they
have not been tampered with since I packed them (please inform me if the
signatures don't match).

Matthias

-- 
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
   "No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually
    suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk."
                          -- Terry Pratchett, _The Colour of Magic_

RELEASE NOTES

5.2.0r4 17Apr98
 - Added %Mac::Speech::Voice [Chris Nandor].
 - Added Chris Nandor's AppleEvent Tutorial and information about the 
   forthcombing MacPerl book.
 - Fixed example in Mac::Processes [Kevin Reid].
 - Saving with nondefault options was unreliable [Stephan Somogyi].
 - Hardcoded paths are now shown in preferences dialog as a reminder 
   [Marcel Riechert].
 - Suspend/Resume events were sometimes swallowed.
 - Clicking in other windows when a nonmodal dialog was in front would crash
   [Kevin Reid].
 - Broke Mac::Fonts exports [Kevin Reid].
 - Found another gremlin adding empty environment variables [Chris Nandor].
 - Mac::Dialogs:SetDialogItemProc was broken [Kevin Reid].
 - Added Mac::QuickTimeVR [Christian Dippel], Mac::Sound [Kevin Lenzo] and 
   Mac::TextEdit modules.
 - AppleScript version property was stuck at 5.1.0 [Stephan Somogyi].
 - Edit menu commands while a MacPerl window was in front would crash [Sean Burke].
 - Adapted code to latest version of Universal Headers.
 - Drawing into a non-front window would sometimes go to the wrong window
   [Alan Fry].
 - Complex toolbox using scripts suffered from massive reentrancy problems in
   the event handlers. As a consequence, even handling has now been substantially
	reorganized: As soon as active event handling is turned on with use Mac::Events.
	Only explicit calls to WaitNextEvent or ModalDialog will get and handle events.
	[Chris Nandor].
 - If no Internet Config handler for pod is installed, MacPerl will now silently
   install Shuck [John Draper].
 - Opening a file in the external editor now brings that editor to the front
   [Paul DuBois].
 - MacPerl would provoke too many mouse moved events.
 - The stack size is now set to a fraction of the application partition size,
   so increasing the application partition can help in cases of massive 
	recursion [Elton Hughes].
 - The "lib" directory path is now hardcoded, so tainted code can use libraries
   more easily [Chris Nandor].
 - Another fix for environment variables [Paul Schinder].
 - Under obscure circumstances, file handles would get confused across script
   boundaries [Angus McIntyre].
 - Disabled -u option, which would not do anything reasonable on a Mac 
   [Vicki Brown].
 - Updated GD module [Chris Nandor].
 - Various minor fixes to the toolbox modules [Chris Nandor, Alan Fry, Rich Morin].
 - Added new, not yet documented, API to schedule Perl code for execution at 
   interrupt time.

Ftp sites
---------

If you have internet access, you can obtain the newest versions of Perl by 
anonymous ftp from one of the following address:

sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch [195.176.255.9]      	software/platform/macos/perl

This site is mirrored in a huge number of CPAN (Common Perl Archive Network) 
mirror sites. Accessing the url http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports/mac/ will
lead you to the mirror closest to you.


Matthias Neeracher					Office:	+41 1 274 14 08
Hohenklingenstrasse 19				Fax:		+41 1 274 14 14
8049 Zuerich							Home: 	+41 1 341 85 06
SWITZERLAND								Email:	<neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>

DISTRIBUTIONS

MacPerl is arranged into a number of distributions, named according to
the following scheme:

Mac_Perl_520r4_appl.bin
^        ^   ^ ^    ^
MacPerl  |   | |    MacBinary Suffix
         |   | Distribution Component
         |   Perl Patchlevel
         MacPerl Release

Currently the following components are available:

  appl           The MacPerl application (Dynamic PowerPC/Small 68K), all
                 libraries and documentation.
  tool           The Perl MPW Tool (Dynamic PowerPC/Small 68K) and scripts.
  bigappl        The MacPerl application (Dynamic PowerPC/Big 68K).
  appl_cfm68K    The MacPerl application (Dynamic PowerPC/Dynamic 68K).
  src            The MacPerl source code.

"Small" means that the application doesn't have the Mac Toolbox modules or
the GD module compiled in (but it still will be a fully functional Perl
otherwise).
"Big" means that the application has those modules compiled in.
"Dynamic" means that the application doesn't have those modules compiled in,
but is able to load them (and arbitrary other modules) as dynamic libraries
and thus behaves as if they were compiled in.

You should install distributions as suggested in the figure below, from bottom
to top (i.e., to get the big MPW tool, install appl, then tool, then bigtool).

                        +---------+-----+
                        | bigtool | src |
+---------+-------------+---------+-----+
| bigappl | appl_cfm68K |      tool     |
+---------+-------------+---------------+
|              appl                     |
+---------------------------------------+


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