How about a 0.5 release?

[Kalle A. Sandstrom]

The 0.4 release has become very old. Old enough to not compile with a modern
version of G++, old enough for the compiler it _can_ be compiled with to not
ship in the two most recent major releases of Debian GNU/Linux. That is
quite old indeed.

So my question is: are there plans to do a 0.5 release of L4Ka::Pistachio?

To provide a bit of context, over the past three or so years I've been
hobbyhorsing together an Unix-like operating system personality on top of
the Pistachio microkernel. (It's available under the GPLv3 at
http://muix.ath.cx for those interested.) For now, it has been written
against the 0.4 headers and quirks[1], but that revision has become
virtually unusable by itself due to reasons mentioned above, and others.

Thus I couldn't release a 0.1 of µiX even if I wanted to: it'd be
unbuildable against the (soon five years old) Pistachio 0.4 simply because
Pistachio can't be compiled as found in the 0.4 tarball on l4ka.org . The
unsatisfactory alternatives would involve taking a development version from
the Mercurial tree and tarballing it up for distribution as a "companion to
µiX 0.1", or developing a large and ultimately pointless patchset against
Pistachio 0.4 to make it compile with g++ 4.3 .

If there are significant issues featurewise with regard to releasing 0.5 as
a snapshot of the Mercurial tree[2], then are these issues large enough to
not release a 0.5 given the problems in retaining 0.4 as the most recent
formal release?



[1] such as the extra parentheses in a caching hint #define, and how the
    header file that defines L4_BootRec_t isn't copied into the install
    directory.

[2] I noted paths in the scheduling code marked as "hole", and a major
    problem in kickstart failing to avoid stepping on boot modules when
    relocating sigma0, the root task and so forth.

--
Kalle A. Sandstro"m                                        ksandstr@...
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