rws@expo.lcs.mit.EDU (Bob Scheifler) (05/28/91)
(Based on our Public Review dates, you should have a pretty good idea of the earliest that R5 could come out, but let me be more precise. :-) The earliest that the R5 core distribution will be finished is the end of July. Assuming that date (which is not guaranteed!), the R5 core would be available to the public around the first of September (it will be available to X Consortium members before that). It will initially only be available by ftp, in order to provide some opportunity for contributed software to be built and tested against it before bundling contributed software together for distribution. We intend there to be a one-month period for this, so the contributed software deadline would be around the first of October. If you would like to be a public ftp site for R5 (worldwide), please send me: your name and postal address roughly how many megabytes of free disk space you have what your network connectivity is why you would be a useful site I will (eventually) get back to you. All contributed software and documentation must include a copyright, and a permission notice that is generally no more restrictive than the standard MIT permission notice (see mit/include/copyright.h in R4, for example). Every file should contain a copyright and permission notice, not just directories. MIT reserves the right to reject contributed software containing what we judge to be inadequate copyrights or unacceptable permission notices. MIT reserves the right to reject public domain software, especially public domain fonts. If you have doubts about your permission notice, you should send it to me for review. All contributed software should have filenames no longer than 14 characters. Software will not be rejected on this basis, but your software will be useless to many people if you do not conform to this. All contributed software should use Imakefiles. MIT reserves the right to reject software that does not use them. All contributed software should be built against R5 before submission. MIT has at least a dozen platforms on which to build software, and reserves the right to reject software that does not build on at least a few of them (although we make no promise to actually build anything). The submission should be clean of garbage files. MIT reserves the right to reject submissions containing lots of executables, backup files, core files, or the like. Large PostScript files should be included in compressed format. All contributed software must be explicitly submitted to MIT; we will not carry forward any old (R4) software into R5, nor will we copy sources from an ftp site without a submission request. Contributions will not be accepted until after the R5 core is released to the public. (Some Consortium members will contribute software prior to this, and a contrib pre-release will likely come out at the same time as the R5 code distribution.)