Welcome to the first official release of Critical Mass Modula-3 version 5.1!
CM3 5.1 is the first open source release of Critical Mass Modula-3. It is a complete easy-to-use and easy-to-install Modula-3 system that contains considerable enhancements over its ancestor DEC SRC Modula-3. Read About CM3 5.1 to learn more.
All the sources are available under the free DEC SRC style copyright. Please read COPYRIGHT-CMASS and COPYRIGHT-DEC. Elego Software Solutions has supported the CM3 5.1 project but does not own any copyrights; the release of the code has been done on request and with explicit authorization from Critical Mass, Inc.
Please read all the available information before downloading any archives.
A lot of people have contributed to the original M3 release by DEC SRC, and the current code release is almost entirely the work of members of Critical Mass. I don't know all the names and cannot provide a list here. It would also not have been possible for me to setup this distribution without PM3 Modula-3.
Several people have contributed to this open source release of CM3 5.1 since the announcement of its availability for test. I hope I will be able to write up a page with their names some time around the official public release. Please don't be annoyed if you don't find your name mentioned here yet; I think it's better to concentrate on the software for some time.
As always with new releases, some bugs appear right after creating the archives :-( Instead of building new release archives, I've created a 5.1.8 fix archive for those without CVSup and CVS ambitions.
CM3 5.1.8 has been released. New distribution archives have been placed on the servers for most of the active platforms. Changes include bug-fixes to the compiler (backend and quake interpreter), extraction of the system call wrappers from m3core into m3gc-enhanced, and addition of and fixes for lots of packages, concerning obliq, shared objects, graphics, and general useful libraries. A more detailed list of the changes can be found here.
Some new distribution archives have been placed on the server, including some fixes to the compiler and documentation. The current release number is now 5.1.6. Those who have installed 5.1.3 or 5.1.4 should rather get the updates via CVSup or CVS than download the big distribution archives. Not all binary installation packages have been rebuilt and updated yet; a full build will probably be deferred until some of the more substantial changes currently in work are finished.
In addition to CVSup access, now anonymous CVS pserver access has been set up, too.
src-update-2001-09-19.tgz has been added, which adds a fix for compilation of m3core on Linux systems using glibc 2.2, some minor package fixes, and the parser tools distribution from the California Institute of Technology, contributed by Karl Papadantonakis.
Some progress has been made on improving the infrastructure of the cm3 source distribution: A cm3 CVSup server has been installed, and the cm3 repository is replicated once every night. As there are still unresolved issues with the domain registration for the machine the server is located on, it can currently only be contacted as ds217-115-141-112.dedicated.hosteurope.de or via IP number 217.115.141.112. The CVSup server currently knows about the collections cm3, cm3-caltech-parser, cm3-doc, cm3-m3-comm, cm3-m3-db, cm3-m3-demo, cm3-m3-games, cm3-m3-lectern, cm3-m3-libs, cm3-m3-mail, cm3-m3-obliq, cm3-m3-pkgtools, cm3-m3-sys, cm3-m3-tools, cm3-m3-ui, cm3-m3-www, cm3-scripts, cm3-www. Anonymous CVS pserver access will be added soon, too.
src-update-2001-05-12.tgz has been added, which contains the differences between releases 5.1.3 and 5.1.4. These are: (1) A fix for m3core/src/text/TextSub.m3, (2) the addition of the Juno-2 packages, which contain a graphical constraint based editor, (3) a do-cm3-std.bat script (untested), and (4) several minor script fixes and improvements.
5.1.4 is also available as the source archive cm3-src-std-5.1.4.tgz, and as a binary installation archive for FreeBSD3. I haven't yet been able to build more distribution archives, but hope to get round to it next week. This should be no big problem, since everybody can easily use the update archive to upgrade his/her system.
Put up another binary installation archive for WIN32, cm3-min-WIN32-NT386-5.1.3a.tgz, for download. The libraries and programs in this archive are built with a recent version of the Microsoft C tools.
A simple build script for NT/Win2000 cmd shells has been added to the latest scripts archive. Some obsolete passages from the web pages have been removed, and some final adjustments before the official release have been made.
The first archives of the official CM3 5.1.3 release have been created. CM3 5.1.3 contains a work-around for the DLL creation / linker problem on NT386 (which actually seems to be a C compiler problem), a last-minute fix for dynamic linked executable on LINUXLIBC6, an almost completely fixed HTML documentation tree, and several minor fixes. The binary installation still supports only four platforms: NT386 Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 on x86), LINUXLIBC6 (Linux with glibc 2.1 on x86), FreeBSD3 (FreeBSD 3.X (4.X, 5.X?)) on x86, and Solaris (SunOS 5.6, 5.7, 5.8) on SPARC. On all these platforms dynamic linking and incremental and generational garbage collection is implemented.
Once all archives are created and uploaded, some old stuff will be removed, cm3-unofficial will be renamed cm3, and an announcement will be posted to the m3 newsgroup.
A chapter about CM3 5.1 Interface Changes and Performance has been added, as well as some updates to the TODO lists.
A new source update archive src-update-2001-03-11.tgz has also been created which contains the following latest changes: updates and fixes for packages cm3 (minimal profiling support for some POSIX systems), cminstall (win32 improvements), libm3 (changed ProcessWin32 module), m3core (FreeBSD4 dtoa fix), scripts, and CMASS copyright texts.
The scripts archive has been updated, too.
Added a new installer for WIN32 which replaces filenames with spaces by their 8.3 equivalent.
Several source and binary distributions have been upgraded to patch level 1 (cm3 5.1.1). This patch level includes all the fixes and extensions prior to 2001-03-01 (described below) plus the following recent changes:
The TODO and package status lists have been updated. Some platform notes have been added on the installation page.
A problem report page has been added. Problem reports will be sent to the GNATS database at elego Software Solutions GmbH.
The most important news is that now documentation is available for CM3 5.1. Much is still missing and not everything is up-to-date, but there is a complete set of documents for all standard packages and interfaces; the nice interfaces overview page from Critical Mass' Reactor distribution has been updated.
The m3tohtml program (which was broken due to several interface changes in the standard libraries) has been fixed. I have also added a user-friendlier frontend, some documentation (try `-h'), and made it more robust. It has been used to generate all the current package documentation in HTML, and you should also be able to use it for your own purposes without much effort.