[ANN] CHICKEN 6.0.0pre1 (prerelease) development snapshot available

Hi all,

A first prerelease development snapshot of CHICKEN 6 is now available:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2024/12/09/chicken-6.0.0pre1.tar.gz

The SHA256 sum of that tarball is
a4beda4eede1e2aa81f1c7d6cd71e0d0f2d3b9aa0023209984f1810fa29e7629

This is not a release candidate yet, it's merely intended for people to
try out the upcoming CHICKEN 6, and as a tarball one can use for
bootstrapping CHICKEN 6 from git.  Note that the "master" branch is
now CHICKEN 6.

Most importantly, building this is now slightly differently from how you
would build older CHICKENs - instead of "make PREFIX=.. PLATFORM=...",
you now first run "./configure --prefix .. --platform ...", followed by
"make" without arguments.  This should help ensure that consistent
options are passed between successive "make" invocations.

The most notable changes which CHICKEN 6 brings are as follows:

- Full support for Unicode (using UTF-8 or latin-1 encoding) in core,
  no need for the utf8 egg anymore.
- Full support for R7RS small in core, no need for the r7rs egg anymore.
- No more support for the plain "mingw" Windows build (i.e., using cmd.exe)
  To build for Windows, you will need a posix shell (i.e. the msys tools).

There's a complete list of changes since 5.4.0 available:
https://code.call-cc.org/dev-snapshots/2024/12/09/NEWS

Several eggs have been ported already, see https://eggs.call-cc.org/6/.

For help porting code from 5 to 6, we've prepared a porting guide at
https://wiki.call-cc.org/porting-c5-to-c6

Please try it out, use it for porting your eggs and try it out on
non-critical systems and let us know if you run into any issues!

Regards,
The CHICKEN Team