Release Notes for Critical Mass Modula-3 5.2.4
----------------------------------------------

Critical Mass Modula-3 5.2.4 is an interim release again mainly for
the benefit of the PPC_DARWIN platform. Several minor bugs have been
fixed or worked around and some small extensions have been made.
These include:

 o The compiler can now be instructed to be lazy with respect to
   alignment restrictions and so allow byte-alignment of
   structures (with the proper BITS FOR statements). This is needed to
   interface to some old legacy native Mac APIs.

 o The m3-tools/macapi utility to generate Modula-3 interfaces from the
   Pascal version of the Apple Universal Interfaces has been provided.

 o The database package m3-db/db has been updated:
   - Native support for PostgreSQL has been added.
   - Native support for MySQL has been added.
   - DB.i3 now allows multiple concurrent connections to different
     sorts of databases.

 o The compiler supports some new options for appending and prepending
   quake code to an m3makefile.

 o The compiler regression tests from PM3 have been imported but still
   need a lot of cleanup until they are really useful again.

 o The documentation in cm3/doc has been cleaned up a bit, many
   broken links have been fixed, some new sections written, and some
   PDF documents have been added.

 o The provided scripts have been improved, better documented, and
   extended, notably ppc-cross-build.sh, install-cm3-compiler.sh, and
   the README file.

CM3 5.2.4 is intended to be the base for the official DarwinPort port
of Modula-3.


Bug Reports
-----------

As always, bug reports should be send to the GNATS data base at elego
Software Solutions GmbH (bugs@elego.de). The web pages at
www.elegosoft.com offer a nice interface for this.


Other Resources
---------------

Since January two mailing lists for the development of Modula-3 exist:
m3devel@elegosoft.com and m3commit@elegosoft.com. The first is for
discussions about planned CM3 and PM3 developement and general
Modula-3 topics, the second distributes the commit log messages of the
CM3 and PM3 repositories via e-mail. You can read archives of these
lists at

  http://mailarchive.elegosoft.com/Zope/m3/m3devel
  http://mailarchive.elegosoft.com/Zope/m3/m3commit

If you want to subscribe to these lists, send mail to
wagner@elegosoft.com.

www.elegosoft.com also provides the complete CVS repositories,
distribution archives, documentation, and various download facilities
(CVS, CVSup, FTP, HTTP) for CM3 and PM3.


Acknowledgments
---------------

Darko Volaric has worked on the DB interfaces, the compiler
alignment, and the macapi utility.

Parzival Herzog has helped with cleaning up the documentation.

Landon Fuller has done the work on the DarwinPort, which is not part
of this CM3 release, but its main cause/motivation. He will be
responsible for the nice and easy installations of CM3 on MacOS X
and other Darwin systems.

All mistakes and oversights should probably be blamed on Olaf Wagner
(that's me :-)