Re: M4 1.4.10b [beta] released

[Eric Blake]

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[adding m4-discuss]

According to Bruno Haible on 2/26/2008 4:35 AM:
| Hi Eric,
|
|> The GNU M4 team is pleased to announce the beta release of M4 1.4.10b.
|> This release features a rewrite of the parsing engine, such that recursive
|> macro expansions that used to scale quadratically in both memory in time
|> are now linear in memory and time.
|
| Effects on "autoconf" in gettext/gettext-tools:
|
| m4-1.4.10      50.6 s real + 1.0 sec system
| m4-1.4.10b     42.1 s real + 0.9 sec system

Similar improvements to what I measured on coreutils, during my 5-month
efforts on getting rid of the quadratic effects.

|
| Wouldn't this be a reason to call the next release m4-1.5 ? It's not only a
| minor improvement.

Historically, we intended for m4-1.5 to introduce modules.  However, that
effort has been stalled for so long (partly because it depends on the
release of libtool 2.2), and introduces such a major rewrite of the
internals, that a couple years ago we made the decision to rename the head
development branch 1.9a, ready to bump to 2.0 once released.  Would anyone
be confused if I make the next stable release on the branch be 1.5 rather
than 1.4.11, even though it means m4-1.5 does not have the historically
promised module capabilities?  It _is_ a rather large rewrite of the
parsing engine, with some impressive speedups.  I have actually been
thinking about the release numbering, even before Bruno's mail.

Also, if I bump the branch to 1.5, I'd like to turn on i18n on the branch.
~ Which means there will have to be at least one more beta release in order
to give the translation teams time to work.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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