Test releases available

[Mark P Jones]

A general comment, then some bug reports:

  Thanks for the test releases of Hugs that we're seeing today!  I hope
  that as many people as possible in the Hugs community will take this
  opportunity to download and test them---particularly in areas that
  matter most to them---before the final releases are made.

  I suspect that some people on this list don't realize the extent to
  which Hugs now relies on support from members of the community.  There
  is *no funding* for work on Hugs as part of any ongoing research project,
  for example.  And while I hope they will benefit from the new release
  in their own efforts, the people who are working hard on getting it out
  are doing this essentially as (skilled) volunteers.  If it wasn't for
  Sigbjorn, Jeff, Johan, Alastair, and others, this release wouldn't
  happen at all.  But all of us can help in some way by testing the
  candidates and reporting back on what we find!

Now to the bug reports: (These minor problems are specific to win32)

  The new installer creates a context menu entry for .hs files in which
  the description is given as "New verb"; this should probably be something
  more like "Load with Hugs98".

  The console version (at least) should not be compiled with HAVE_WINEXEC
  set to 1.  First of all, that setting defeats the way that Hugs was
  designed to integrate the interpreter and the editor; the two activities
  should be interleaved rather than executed as concurrent processes that
  require manual :reload commands, etc...  Secondly, with at least one
  choice of external editor (vim), it causes the whole console window to
  hang, so you never actually get to make any edits, and you certainly
  don't get back to the Hugs prompt or to the command prompt.  At the
  very least, perhaps the #if HAVE_WINEXEC line in machdep.c could be
  changed to #if (HAVE_WINEXEC && HUGS_FOR_WINDOWS)?   (please ... :-)

All the best,
Mark