rms@PREP.AI.MIT.EDU (11/10/86)
From: rms@PREP.AI.MIT.EDU (Richard M. Stallman) I want to remind everyone that Emacs version 18 being distributed now for *testing*. Nobody says it is supposed to work. If you are not a wizard and don't have the skills and time to debug weird problems, I recommend that you not try to work with version 18 now. If you are not on the internet and cannot easily copy diffs for new subversions, that is also probably a reason not to work with version 18. Version 18 has been having difficulties on many machines, especially in unexec, because I have made rearrangements in it to try to make it easier to port. Version 17 was ported to many machines using machine-specific conditionals in the code. For version 18 I studied these conditionals and then designed mechanisms that are more portable or depend on orthogonal and definable configuration parameters. But testing on several machines was needed to get the general scheme debugged. I will announce here when version 18 is stable.