Re: On preparations to turn the Bear past 11

Thanks Mark for all your efforts!

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 00:16 Mark Evenson <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dear long-suffering fans of the Bear,
>
> Rejoice! for preparations for the release of abcl-1.6.0 to support
> openjdk{6,7,8,11} and beyond near completion.
>
> We have managed to get a [Continuous Integration (CI)][travis-builds]
> build mostly working via Travis CI integration with the Github
> repository.  Anyone who forks us on Github with suitable monkeying
> around can get automated build and test results for their commits to
> their fork.  The [current version of the tests][.travis.yml] attempt
> to run in environments that are the cross product of macOS/Linux with
> openjdk8/openjdk11.  This isn't quite completely working yet as I
> haven't apparently figured out how to use jenv in Travis to specify
> the correct openjdk to invoke, but I'm close.  For now, we at least
> getting test coverage for openjdk11 under Linux, and I hope to iron
> out the remaining kinks real soon now.  It should be theoretically
> possible to [add Windows builds][windows-builds] as well, but I am
> planning on to tackling that in the near future.
>
> The CI tests have given me the confidence to next attempt to release
> abcl-1.6.0 via existing release engineering process in spite of the
> following problems:
>
> 1. While they seemingly pass in the CI, the CFFI linkages to CL+SSL
>    libraries often fail in a spectacularly segmentation fault in
>    practical use.  With judicious refinement, I think we can figure
>    out what is going but for now we should just accept this.
>
> 2. [A major regression from abcl-1.5.0][pathname-problems] concerning
>    the use of CL:PATHNAME to refer to objects within a jar/zip archive
>    has been discovered, but curiously it is seemingly not fatal to
>    anything other than the execution of ABCL test suite.  In analyzing
>    the problems, I realized that we can considerably clean up our
>    abstraction for a CL:PATHNAME which denotes an entry in an archive
>    by allowing nested archives using the CL:PATHNAME-DEVICE component.
>    To do this in a reasonably clean manner means a fair amount of
>    modification on the Java side of our implementation by reflecting
>    the various types of a CL:PATHNAME in that Java hierarchy as Erik
>    Hülsmann suggested many years ago.  While I have some promising
>    preliminary patches towards this, due to the amount of outstanding
>    effort, I feel we should get abcl-1.6.0 out first.
>
> Please holler loudly real soon if anyone has problems with releasing
> as things currently stand.
>
> I intend follow up with abcl-1.6.1 within a month to hopefully address
> the two major blockers in addition to any errata.
>
> [travis-builds]: https://travis-ci.org/armedbear/abcl/builds
> [.travis.yml]: https://github.com/armedbear/abcl/blob/master/.travis.yml
> [windows-builds
> <https://github.com/armedbear/abcl/blob/master/.travis.yml%5Bwindows-builds>]:
> https://twitter.com/ArmedBear/status/1197538417678192645
> [cl+ssl-problems
> <https://twitter.com/ArmedBear/status/1197538417678192645%5Bcl+ssl-problems>]:
> https://abcl.org/trac/ticket/464
> [pathname-problems]:
> https://github.com/armedbear/abcl/commit/e962be5e0dd86335cc66415a0a417f9e4bb3040b
>
> yers,
> Mark <[email protected]>
>
> --
> "A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before but there is
> nothing
> to compare to it now."
>
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