New Release Scheme.

[Tyson Dowd]

Hi,

We've made some changes to the release of the day mechanism in
Mercury.  We now have "unstable" releases of the day (didn't pass
all tests, but did manage to compile the compiler successfully),
which should be released almost every day.  So you can get at the
latest features a little more easily.

Also, we recently got all the test cases working again (lots of little
problems that needed to be fixed), so a new stable release-of-the-day is
now available too.

We have also split the release so that the tests are not part
of the main downloadable file (makes downloading a little quicker).
Eventually we may split the library and runtime so you can install
them separately (so you can use Mercury programs without having
the Mercury compiler installed).

See the web page for more info: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/

Here's the relevant page from it:

-------

Release of the Day

   Mercury can have up to three different releases at any given point.
   
   The most stable release will is a numbered release, such as 0.6 or
   0.7.3. These releases have been extensively tested, and often have
   pre-compiled binary packages for easy installation.
   
   To cater for those who need access to the latest cutting edge features
   of Mercury, but would still like some stability, we release a daily
   snapshot of the development system. This is called a "release of the
   day (ROTD)" and is given a version number "rotd-YYYY-MM-DD" according
   to the date it was built. When the compiler passes all its tests, a
   ROTD is put into the beta-releases directory of the [16]Mercury ftp
   site. The Mercury compiler is written in Mercury, and compiles Mercury
   into C code. These releases contain the Mercury code and the generated
   C code for the compiler. You need a C compiler (such as gcc) to build
   the compiler and runtime system. Once built, the Mercury compiler is
   capable of generating its own C code (the process of getting a
   compiler to compile itself is called bootstrapping, because it is like
   the compiler lifting itself up by its own boot straps).
   
   For some people, the cutting edge is not enough, and they want the
   bleeding edge. To help these developers, we have an unstable release
   of the day. This is just like a ROTD, but may not have passed all its
   tests. It is marked with a version number "rotd-YYYY-MM-DD-unstable",
   and is also available on the [17]Mercury ftp site.
   
   Please treat ROTDs with caution -- although they are often very useful
   and reasonably stable, they are not widely tested, and may have
   unfinished features and rough edges. We are still interested in
   feedback and bug reports on the ROTDs.

References

  16. ftp://turiel.cs.mu.OZ.AU/pub/mercury/beta-releases/
  17. ftp://turiel.cs.mu.OZ.AU/pub/mercury/beta-releases/

--
Tyson.