Mozart 1.3.0 is released

[Konstantin Popov]

Dear All,

We are happy to announce that 

   The Mozart Programming System 1.3.0

is available now at:

   http://www.mozart-oz.org

Currently available are packages for Linux, Solaris/SPARC, MacOS X and
Windows.

Mozart 1.3.0 is both the development and maintenance release. The work
on 1.3.0 began immediately after 1.2.0, while the subsequent 1.2.*
releases were intended primarily as maintenance releases. The Mozart
system that became 1.3.0 has been extensively (and successfully) used
for our own research projects.

Oz has evolved with Mozart 1.3.0: the "byneed" synchronization and Oz
"futures" have been redesigned and reimplemented, as well as stateful
entities can be accessed using the uniform syntax. 

Usability of Mozart has been improved by implementing much stricter
liveness analysis during garbage collection, eliminating certain
(quite common) kinds of memory leaks in Oz programs. The distribution
subsystem has been the subject of performance analysis and
improvements.

And of course, a lot of bugs have been fixed too.

For more information, check the "Changes" log and the documentation.


CREDITS

A lot of people have contributed. I would like to mention the
following persons in particular:

  - Kevin Glynn
    - the "first mate" for the release - that alone would be more
      than enough ;-(
    - fixing the "uniform access syntax" and the liveness analysis
  - Raphael Collet
    - "by-need" synchronization
  - Fred Spiessens
    - "by-need" synchronization
  - Denys Duchier
    - for many many many things, but in particular for raising the entropy,
      which is crucial for finding good solutions in the end
  - Donatien Grolaux
    - QTk
  - Thorsten Brunklaus
    - packaging&overall Windows maintenance
    - web server coordination
  - Andreas Rossberg
    - for making sure that Mozart still works for the Alice system
  - Marc-Antoine Parent
    - the MacOS X enthusiast
  - Terence M. Rokop
    - NASTY bootstrapping bug causing pickle loading problems since AGES
  - Nils Franzen 
    - Windows tester (IMHO not very much rewarding, so - EXTRA credit!)
  - Boris Mejias 
    - Linux tester (.. someone must do it too, so - EXTRA credit too!)

Sorry if I forgot somebody.


PLEASE contribute binary RPMs

As it has been with the previous Mozart releases, we rely on YOUR help
to provide binary packages for hardware platforms we either do not
posses or unfortunately have no resources to deal with. In particular,
everybody using an RPM-based Linux system is welcome to submit missing
Mozart binary RPM packages for specific Linux distributions. You just
have to fetch the source RPM"s and execute (as root):

	rpmbuild --rebuild XXX.src.rpm

This will produce binary RPMs normally found under
'/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386'.  For older Linux distributions, use 'rpm'
instead of 'rpmbuild'.

Building binary packages for Un*x flavours is certainly possible too
(except 64 bit platforms - we'll look some day into it) - interested
persons should check the installation manual, as well the "misc"
subdirectory in Mozart sources.

Send us an URL your binary RPMs can be downloaded from, and we will
place them on our download page.


MOGUL and Mozart 1.3.0

The not so good news is that currently MOGUL is "en masse"
inconsistent with the Mozart 1.3.0 system: majority of Mogul entries
require Mozart NOT OLDER than 1.2.5. Roughly, two things are to be
done:

. The Mogul infrastructure has to support Mozart version tags
. Package owners will need to update and check their packages for
  Mozart 1.3.0

The latter should be trivial, except that unpacking older MOGUL
packages requires Mozart 1.2.5 together with the 'ozmake' suitable for
it.

We are working on the issue, and will notify Mogul contributors as
they can start converting their packages.


BUG reports

Inevitably, there will be more bugs - PLEASE submit them to our
bug-tracking system, using either the web interface or by email to
bugs at mozart-oz.org.  Good bug reports will improve the quality of
Mozart! Reports need to be complete, including an Oz program that
shows a problem, clear instructions how to run it, and the Mozart
version and platform you are running on. Oz programs need to be as
short and clear as possible, possibly with the exception when the Oz
engine crashes itself. We hope it is clear that without this
information a bug report cannot, and will not be considered.


With Regards,

 --- Kostja.