peterd@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) (10/19/90)
-------------< They're heeeerre! (almost) >----------------- Well, here I am, back to tease you all again. Tonight we send out our X11 Release 4 port to those people who have written to me volunteering to act as beta sites. Those who wrote were added to a mailing list we maintain for this subject and if you are on it you should already have received mail from me a few days ago. If you wrote and have not received such mail, write again. You should also receive supply details some time tonight from the list. Our plan is to leave it in the hands of the beta sites for up to two weeks, collecting and acting upon bug reports. If there are no major hitchs, it should be available for general release on a couple of our ftp archive sites by the end of the month. (Yeah, I know today's the 18th and 18 plus 14 is 32. Get a life! :-) It will be submitted back to MIT, will be available as a set of diffs from the standard release, and even has a sexy little icon. Kudos to Mike Parker (mouse) who did the server port and made it all happen. I have seen considerable discussion about whether NeXT is ever going to actually support X. I can't say, but I can say that the sales and marketing people I have dealt with have been universally enthusiastic about what we are doing, and they have told me that NeXT would be willing to supply some beta hardware for further work (a colour port, etc). I have the name of people at NeXT involved in special projects support and I'm trying to get them on the phone (the guy I'm after has been out of town and I have not yet gotten a firm commitment from anyone for beta hardware, etc so we can do developement and testing. Nor have I yet received my beta Release 2 of the O/S, but it's supposed to be in the mail). I have been in contact with a firm that has been working with NeXT on the possibility of a commercial X release. We have already given this firm what we have done to date, they are a volunteer beta site for us and they have promised to work with us so our projects can complement each other. Note that this does _NOT_ mean NeXT will support X, and I am _NOT_ revealing something I learned under non-disclosure about X support, only that NeXT has spoken to people about X, these people have contacted me and nobody seems to be hiding what they are doing. I wasn't sworn to secrecy, so I'm telling the net. X for the NeXT is real (from us), I still can't decide if it will ever get official NeXT blessing. I hope so, since I think it is their one glaring weakness in the workstation world, and one that is easy to fix. I would say then, that NeXT might perhaps be persuaded to support X, but have not yet done so. Write them if you think they should! Meanwhile, If you want it, a two-bit version will be available from us for general release some time around November 1 and will be in source form so others can help finish it. If you desperately need it tomorrow, send me mail. In exchange, we would expect bug reports and no nasty comments to the net about quality before we claim it is 1.0..... Now, go back to arguing about that Mac emulator, or better yet, somebody start reimplementing NeXTstep in Xwindows, so I can run it on my NeXT! - peterd ^X ^I .signature -------------------------------------------------------------------------- +-------+ Peter Deutsch McGill University | u # u | peterd@cs.mcgill.ca School of Computer Science |/\/\/\/| | a a | "From MAILER-DAEMON@hq.demos.su Thu Sep 13 00:45:55 MSD 1990" \ a / \___/ The day we made contact.... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Look! I can type after the signature!