New R8B pre-releases

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

************************ R8B PRE-RELEASES ************************

We are asking you for help testing the pre-releases (P8A) for R8B.
These are snapshots from our daily build and test.

The release notes and documentation is not completed yet but you can
view it in its current state, including a preliminary description of
the release highlights, at

  http://www.erlang.org/doc/p8a/doc/
  http://www.erlang.org/doc/p8a/doc/highlights.html

The different releases are

  http://www.erlang.se/lic_area/protected/releases/otp_sunos5_P8A-20010906-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz

    Solaris 2.5.1 commercial binary pre-release. It is tested on
    Solaris 2.5.1, Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7.

  http://www.erlang.se/lic_area/protected/releases/otp_solaris8_P8A-20010906-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz

    Solaris 8 commercial binary pre-release.

  http://www.erlang.org/download/prereleases/otp_src_P8A-20010906-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz

    OpenSource pre-release. Should compile and run on most Unix and
    Linux platforms including Apple OS X.

  http://www.erlang.org/download/prereleases/otp_win32_P8A-20010906-SNAPSHOT.exe

    Windows release.

  http://www.erlang.org/download/prereleases/otp_doc_html_P8A-20010906-SNAPSHOT.tar.gz

    HTML documentation and Unix man pages.

The most important changes from the previous snapshot:

  A memory allocator/garbage collector bug was fixed.

  Internal changes in HIPE. Also, all HIPE-files mentioned in Makefiles
  should now also be included.

  The compiler generates slightly smaller and faster code for record
  updates.

  There is a new external format for funs. Sending funs over erlang
  distribution to erlang nodes should work transparently (the old format
  is automatically used when talking to R7 or older nodes). erl_interface
  and ei does not yet recognize the new format.

Some notes:

  The graphical debugger is known to be broken.

  The HTML documentation links to 'ic', 'jinterface' and 'orber'
  are known to be broken. The Unix man pages for 'sofs' and 'xref'
  can't be reached with "erl -man <module-name>".

  The HIPE (High-Performance Erlang) native code compiler for Sparc and
  Intel is integrated into the OpenSource release. You can find more
  information about HIPE at "http://www.csd.uu.se/projects/hipe/".

  Solaris binary commercial pre-releases are packed using Solaris TAR,
  all others are packed using GNU TAR.

  All applications have the build date as the version number.

Please send problem reports to <erlang-questions@REDACTED>. If you
are a paying customer you can alternatively send the problem reports
to <support@REDACTED>.

The OTP Team