Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.28 Release Candidate 2

I have created archives (and Ghostscript Windows installers) for the
second public release candidates for Ghostscript and GhostPDL 9.28, and
they are available here:

https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/tag/gs928rc2


Our internal testing uncovered some regressions with PDF transparency,
some problems with new transparency features (16bps blending). There
were also several issues found by user testing (much appreciated!) and
internal testing with the new SAFER/file permissions code.

Hence we felt another release candidate was warranted.


I'm going to reiterate comments from the first candidate here, just in
case anyone missed it the first time around:


There are some very important changes in this release:

First: we have ground-up rewritten the file access controls that were
the major benefit of the "SAFER" code.

Second: as we've promised (threatened?) for years, SAFER is now enabled
by default (it can still be disabled with "-dNOSAFER").

Third: those of you still paying attention will probably have worked out
that the implication of the above two points is that some very new code
is being enabled by default!

As a consequence, we want to give users an extended chance to find what
we did wrong.

Note that the previous SAFER behaviour can still be accessed by using
"-dSAFER -dOLDSAFER" - but this will only be true until we're convinced
we've got no reason to keep the old behaviour.


Although we're starting this release candidate process early, we're
still targetting the 9.28 release on the "normal" schedule (late
September/early Oct), in order to give as much testing time as possible
for the new code.


Please give the release candidate a try on your system if you're
interested in helping test the release-in-progress. Your feedback is
always appreciated, but especially so with this release.


All the best,

Chris