[Bug-wget] Wget 1.12 releasing soon...

[Micah Cowan]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

So, as far as I'm concerned, the current sources are good for a (Unix)
release. They seem to build and test fine on several prominent, modern
Unix (and of course GNU) systems, and the test suites give me much more
confidence in Wget's stability than I was ever able to achieve for any
of the 1.11 releases.

I've given the latest version to the translators, as there is one new
message string since they last had a go. Once they've had about a week
(they tend to work quite quickly), Wget will probably be ready to release.

If I get it to build on Windows (any method) before then, I'll include
those relevant changes in the sources, too... but it may not include
"frills" like IDN/IRI support, or even statically-linked builds. I think
"polished" Windows support will probably have to wait until 1.12.1 -
even if we get nice builds going for Windows wgets, there won't have
been sufficient time to _test_ wget on Windows, so the quality will be
dubious.

In the past (1.11 "dot oh"), we threw up some candidate releases at
alpha.gnu.org and let people have at it before putting up an official
release. I do not believe that this was worth the time and effort, as it
soon became plain that 1.11 had severe quality issues, despite giving
people the opportunity to test. The truth is that this mailing list has
a low number of people who are able to really exercise Wget, and the
"real" testing doesn't take place until the distros start packaging it.
Meanwhile, the test suites provide much better coverage than they had in
1.11, which helps to mitigate (but not eliminate) the risk in releasing
something that hasn't had a "beta" cycle.

I do expect that we'll probably get some build-failures on older or
non-mainstream (or non-free) systems that didn't get any love for me
during testing, and those sorts of patches will end up in 1.12.1.

Having said all this, if anyone here _is_ interested in trying out Wget,
 the package I provided to the translators is available at
http://addictivecode.org/wget/wget-1.12-pre6.tar.gz, and should work.
This package includes the configure script and Makefile.in's, so you
shouldn't need automake or autoconf. You _will_ need openssl (and
associated header files, from the "-devel" package or whatnot) if you
want HTTPS support, and you'll need libidn and (on some systems)
libiconv if you want the IDN/IRI support. And "gettext", if you're on a
non-GNU system and want Native Language Support.

I may add a few more tests and tweaks, but that package is pretty close
to what's going to be released soon.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
Maintainer of GNU Wget and GNU Teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkqoINgACgkQ7M8hyUobTrFpRgCfT8N+hB2Io9WhnYd3umEoIYeC
S/cAn3d9KPlHrjSsLEdY1iV+GcrjFZCV
=WRJa
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----