Releasing WinHugs

[Ross Paterson]

On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 04:10:57PM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> With the patches that have been submitted, the bug list for WinHugs
> hits 0, see http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/NeilMitchell_2fHugsNotes .

If you don't count interact as a bug.  Do getChar/putChar work?

> If anyone knows of any other bugs, or finds any, please let me know.
> If anyone thinks anything in the polish section is a bit more
> important also let me know. I think I'm ready for limited beta
> testing, so if anyone wants that also let me know. Also if anyone has
> any overall comments (I miss this, why did you change that, how do I
> do this, i can't see the use of that) I'd love to hear them.

A WinHugs blurb for the User's Guide is important; it doesn't
have to be very long.

What would :main do?

You might like to check whether HGL works with WinHugs: try running
main in hugsdir/demos/HGL/GTest.hs -- it should pop up lots of windows
that react to events in different ways (README in that directory gives
the details).

> When does it suit to release WinHugs? It needs a bit longer for beta
> testing etc, but is a Hugs release being planned soon, or should
> WinHugs be released separately? How stable is the Hugs code base, i.e.
> is it release worthy?

It would be great if a release of the whole thing could be done soon.

As I understand it, the state of play is:
- Hugs is ready under Unix.
- The programs and libraries build under MSYS+MinGW and appear to work.
- Need to check whether the Unicode stuff works under Windows.
- The plain interpreter hasn't been built under VC++ for some time;
  someone needs to do that and test it.
- WinHugs builds under MSYS+MinGW, but the executable just hangs.
  (Not essential to fix this, but would be nice.)
- Someone will have to do the Windows packaging, including the program
  compiled with VC++ (for the stack overflow protection) and the
  documentation is HTML Help form.