[ANN] CHICKEN 5.4.0 release candidate available

Hello everyone,

We are happy to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming
CHICKEN 5.4.0.

CHICKEN 5.4.0rc1 is now available at this location:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2024/05/31/chicken-5.4.0rc1.tar.gz

The SHA256 sum of that tarball is
61d59cb4f3ca226995d7dca3510c7a646c2cf1e28ebc771bf6c5177e28d14c81

This is mostly a bugfix and maintenance release, preparing for the
upcoming CHICKEN 6 release (hopefully later this year).

It contains some security hardening regarding option parsing and a
fix for CVE-2022-45145 handling of escape characters in egg metadata.

Notable new features are new thread-safe APIs for POSIX signals and
finalizers, support for weak pairs and having line numbers available
on error traces in the interpreter.

The complete list of changes since version 5.3.0 is available here:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2024/05/31/NEWS

Please give it a test and report your findings to the mailing list.

Here's a suggested test procedure:

  $ make PREFIX=<some dir> install check
  $ <some dir>/bin/chicken-install pastiche

If you want to build CHICKEN with a compiler other than the default one,
just use C_COMPILER=<the compiler> (e.g., C_COMPILER=clang) on the make
invocation.

Of course, feel free to explore other supported build options (see the
README file for more information) and actually use CHICKEN 5.3.0rc1 for
your software.

If you can, please let us know the following information about the
environment you tested the RC tarball on:

Operating system: (e.g., FreeBSD 14.0, Debian 12, Windows 11 mingw-msys under 
mingw32)
Hardware platform: (e.g., x86, x86-64, PPC)
C Compiler: (e.g., GCC 11.3.0, clang 16.0.6)
Installation works?: yes or no
Tests work?: yes or no
Installation of eggs works?: yes or no

Thanks in advance!

The CHICKEN Team