[m-dev.] New release?

[Julien Fischer]

Hi Paul,

On Tue, 20 Oct 2015, Paul Bone wrote:

> Simple question, difficult answer..
>
> Is now a good time for a new Mercury release?

It's certainly time we had another one; the GC upgrade was the main block.

> Last time Julien and I spoke about this, quite a while ago, I recall that we
> wanted to upgrade Boehm GC first.  Now that that is done is there any other
> planned changes that we'd like to wait for?

Before we branch we need to finalise the break-up of the standard library's
'term' module, as per the following thread
<http://www.mercurylang.org/list-archives/reviews/2015-February/017741.html>.
In particular, the type term.context/0 needs to be moved to its own module.

Bug #357, "Parallel conjunction broken on OS X" is a showstopper.  The
actual situation is worse than described in that bug report, _none_ of the
.par grades currently work on OS X.  (They worked in 14.01.)

In addition, the following bugs really ought to be resolved before
any release:

    * Bug #278: Compiler crash from bad state variable use.
    * Bug #373: string.to_float imprecisely specified.

(There's almost certainly some other bugs that we would ideally address as
well.)

There's some more standard library issues that aren't currently in the bug
database, for example float.round_to_int/1 and friends have inconsistent
behaviours across different backends when their argument won't fit in an int.
(I'll add an entry to Mantis for this.)

There was a list of things we wanted to do to address the "too many grades"
problem.  Some of these have been done (e.g. hiding user facing documentation
for experimental grade components), others haven't yet (e.g. merging the 'tr'
and 'trseg' grade components and renaming the grade component options).  See
the following thread:
<http://www.mercurylang.org/list-archives/reviews/2014-September/017297.html>

> I've noticed that Zoltan has been doing a lot of refactoring.  Is it best to
> wait until this settles down and has been tested in ROTDs for a little
> while?

Answered elsewhere in this thread.

> Or is that what the release candidates/betas are for?

Ideally, they are not for testing large scale restructures such as the ones
Zoltan has been working on.  We will need to let things stablise first.

Julien.