real release date for 0.8

[Fergus Henderson]

On 28-Sep-1998, jc at cs.york.ac.uk <jc at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> I'm currently holding off getting my system people to install
> Mercury, since I'm waiting for 0.8 to arrive. However, I have 2
> students doing a project using Mercury the start of October. I'm also
> giving a brief intro to Mercury on a module that starts early
> November. 
> 
> Is it realistic to expect 0.8 to be released before, say 5/10 ?

Short answer: no.

We have code for some major improvements to the debugger that we want
to include in 0.8 but which has not yet been integrated into the
development sources.  That is the only new feature not yet included in
the current development sources and the latest "ROTD" (release-of-the-day)
release.  The other work remaining is mainly fixing outstanding bugs
and testing.

A more realistic estimate would be that we can release a feature-complete
beta release by about mid October, and then after a couple of weeks of
testing and bug fixing we can release 0.8 around the end of October.

Please take these dates as estimates only.  In general we would prefer
to spend the time needed to ensure that each release meets our high
standards with regard to quality, reliability and so forth, rather than
trying to rush things to get it out the door by a particular date.

The most recent development version does have a number of significant
improvements over 0.7 and 0.7.3.  If you need a version by a particular
date, then may well be worthwhile for you to install one of our "ROTD"
releases -- see <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/download/rotd.html>.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.