SunOS, Java and ODBC support by Filip Hajny
and some tests by Matthias Kretschmer.
Changes in R13B03
-----------------
There are mostly error corrections, but also some new functionality.
Some highlights in the R13B03 release are:
- Native Implemented Functions (NIFs) still experimental but very useful.
- The documentation is built in a new way using xsltproc and Apache FOP.
The layout is changed both in HTML and PDF versions. This is the first
step, more changes and improvements will come in the following releases.
Changes between R13A and R13B02 are unknown.
Changes in R13A
---------------
1.1 Erlang Language and Run-time System
Multi-core and SMP performance improvements
There SMP performance is significantly improved:
- multiple, scheduler specific run queues;
- further optimized message passing;
- CPU-bound scheduler threads.
Unicode support as described in EEP10
New BIF's: atom_to_binary/2, binary_to_atom/2, binary_to_existing_atom/2.
Independent Erlang clusters on the same host
1.2 New Applications
Reltool, release management tool.
WxErlang
1.3 New features in Existing Applications
Common_test
- SSH and SFTP support
- test case groups
Dialyzer
- opaque type declarations;
- UTF segments handling
SSL
- pure Erlang implementation (except crypto routines)
STDLIB
- scanner has been augmented to return white-space, comments
and exact location of tokens.
This changes the buildlink3.mk files to use an include guard for the
recursive include. The use of BUILDLINK_DEPTH, BUILDLINK_DEPENDS,
BUILDLINK_PACKAGES and BUILDLINK_ORDER is handled by a single new
variable BUILDLINK_TREE. Each buildlink3.mk file adds a pair of
enter/exit marker, which can be used to reconstruct the tree and
to determine first level includes. Avoiding := for large variables
(BUILDLINK_ORDER) speeds up parse time as += has linear complexity.
The include guard reduces system time by avoiding reading files over and
over again. For complex packages this reduces both %user and %sys time to
half of the former time.
=== SMP Support ===
The major news is the support for SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing).
SMP is supported by most modern operating systems like Linux, Windows, Mac OSx,
Solaris and is becoming more important now when dual processors,
hyper-threading technology and multi-core systems are a reality.
With Erlang, most of the problems which occur in multi-threaded programs have
been solved once and for all in the Erlang VM and do not have to be handled by
the application programmers.
In the SMP version of the Erlang virtual machine, there can be many process
schedulers running in separate OS threads. As default there will be as many
schedulers as there are processors or processor cores on the system.
The SMP support is totally transparent for the Erlang programs. That is, there
is no need to change or recompile existing programs. Programs with built-in
assumptions about sequential execution must be rewritten in order to take
advantage of the SMP support, however.
In this release, the Erlang VM supports SMP with focus on stability. There will
follow a number of subsequent steps with necessary optimizations and support
for more platforms.
=== Erlang Language and Related Issues ===
* The andalso and orelse operators are now allowed to be used in guards.
That also applies to match specifications.
* The BIF is_record/3 can now be used in guards. Also, is_record/3 can now
be called without an erlang: module prefix for consistency with the other
is_* functions.
* The compiler options ignore_try and ignore_cond, which allowed code that
used unquoted try or cond as atoms or record tags, has been removed. Old
code that depended on the options need to be revised to have occurrences
of try or cond as atom or record tags single-quoted. (Note: Although cond
is a reserved keyword, there is no cond statement. It might be introduced
in a future release.)
* (ERTS 5.4.8) The new fun M:F/A construct creates a fun that refers to the
latest version of M:F/A. This syntax is meant to replace tuple funs {M,F}
which have many problems.
* (ERTS 5.4.8) The new type test is_function(Fun, Arity) -- which may be
used in guards -- test whether Fun is a fun that can be applied to Arity
arguments.
=== New Applications ===
Dialyzer
Dialyzer is a static analysis tool that identifies software discrepancies such
as type errors, unreachable code, unnecessary tests, etc in single Erlang
modules or entire (sets of) applications.
Inviso
The Inviso application, together with some new extensions to Runtime_Tools, is
aimed at providing features for efficient tracing of production Erlang/OTP
systems:
* Distributed tracing - tracing on any number of Erlang nodes.
* Autostart - tracing during system start-up.
* Overload protection - mechanisms for suspending and later reactivating
tracing, should an overload situation occur.
* Enhanced use of meta tracing.
* Trace cases - predefined specifications of what to trace.
* Off-line merging and formatting of log files.
Inviso is still under development. An easier-to-use trace tool, using the
features listed above, is planned to be released as an R11B patch in Q3/Q4
2006.
SSH
The SSH application is an Erlang implementation of the secure shell protocol.
It is considered to be a beta release, meaning there can be changes made to the
API before it reaches 1.0.
=== Existing Applications ===
Compiler
(Compiler 4.3.6) It is now possible to encrypt the debug information in Beam
files.
Debugger
(Debugger 2.0) The debugger can now handle the try/catch language construct.
Inets
The Erlang implementation of the TFTP procotcol, tftp, is now documented.
Kernel
In Kernel 2.10.X, several bug fixes and improvements have been made in global ,
the global name registration facility.
OS_Mon
(OS_Mon 2.0) The entire OS_Mon application (code and documentation) has been
reviewed and consequently updated with the goal to make the application more
robust, homogeneous and easier to configure.
STDLIB
Added the zip module with functions for reading and creating zip archives.
and add a new helper target and script, "show-buildlink3", that outputs
a listing of the buildlink3.mk files included as well as the depth at
which they are included.
For example, "make show-buildlink3" in fonts/Xft2 displays:
zlib
fontconfig
iconv
zlib
freetype2
expat
freetype2
Xrender
renderproto
RECOMMENDED is removed. It becomes ABI_DEPENDS.
BUILDLINK_RECOMMENDED.foo becomes BUILDLINK_ABI_DEPENDS.foo.
BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.foo becomes BUILDLINK_API_DEPENDS.foo.
BUILDLINK_DEPENDS does not change.
IGNORE_RECOMMENDED (which defaulted to "no") becomes USE_ABI_DEPENDS
which defaults to "yes".
Added to obsolete.mk checking for IGNORE_RECOMMENDED.
I did not manually go through and fix any aesthetic tab/spacing issues.
I have tested the above patch on DragonFly building and packaging
subversion and pkglint and their many dependencies.
I have also tested USE_ABI_DEPENDS=no on my NetBSD workstation (where I
have used IGNORE_RECOMMENDED for a long time). I have been an active user
of IGNORE_RECOMMENDED since it was available.
As suggested, I removed the documentation sentences suggesting bumping for
"security" issues.
As discussed on tech-pkg.
I will commit to revbump, pkglint, pkg_install, createbuildlink separately.
Note that if you use wip, it will fail! I will commit to pkgsrc-wip
later (within day).
developer is officially maintaining the package.
The rationale for changing this from "tech-pkg" to "pkgsrc-users" is
that it implies that any user can try to maintain the package (by
submitting patches to the mailing list). Since the folks most likely
to care about the package are the folks that want to use it or are
already using it, this would leverage the energy of users who aren't
developers.
systems, but the code that take care of them is inly implemented
on Linux. This made the build go into an infinite loop on NetBSD.
Disable floating point exceptions on NetBSD/amd64 for now, until
I get around implementing and testing the necessary sigaction glue.
been updated in more than two years.)
- Add a buildlink3.mk file.
- Make the Java dependency optional, and disable this option by default (this
will make erlang build in more bulk builds).
Ok by wiz.
around at either build-time or at run-time is:
USE_TOOLS+= perl # build-time
USE_TOOLS+= perl:run # run-time
Also remove some places where perl5/buildlink3.mk was being included
by a package Makefile, but all that the package wanted was the Perl
executable.
Several changes are involved since they are all interrelated. These
changes affect about 1000 files.
The first major change is rewriting bsd.builtin.mk as well as all of
the builtin.mk files to follow the new example in bsd.builtin.mk.
The loop to include all of the builtin.mk files needed by the package
is moved from bsd.builtin.mk and into bsd.buildlink3.mk. bsd.builtin.mk
is now included by each of the individual builtin.mk files and provides
some common logic for all of the builtin.mk files. Currently, this
includes the computation for whether the native or pkgsrc version of
the package is preferred. This causes USE_BUILTIN.* to be correctly
set when one builtin.mk file includes another.
The second major change is teach the builtin.mk files to consider
files under ${LOCALBASE} to be from pkgsrc-controlled packages. Most
of the builtin.mk files test for the presence of built-in software by
checking for the existence of certain files, e.g. <pthread.h>, and we
now assume that if that file is under ${LOCALBASE}, then it must be
from pkgsrc. This modification is a nod toward LOCALBASE=/usr. The
exceptions to this new check are the X11 distribution packages, which
are handled specially as noted below.
The third major change is providing builtin.mk and version.mk files
for each of the X11 distribution packages in pkgsrc. The builtin.mk
file can detect whether the native X11 distribution is the same as
the one provided by pkgsrc, and the version.mk file computes the
version of the X11 distribution package, whether it's built-in or not.
The fourth major change is that the buildlink3.mk files for X11 packages
that install parts which are part of X11 distribution packages, e.g.
Xpm, Xcursor, etc., now use imake to query the X11 distribution for
whether the software is already provided by the X11 distribution.
This is more accurate than grepping for a symbol name in the imake
config files. Using imake required sprinkling various builtin-imake.mk
helper files into pkgsrc directories. These files are used as input
to imake since imake can't use stdin for that purpose.
The fifth major change is in how packages note that they use X11.
Instead of setting USE_X11, package Makefiles should now include
x11.buildlink3.mk instead. This causes the X11 package buildlink3
and builtin logic to be executed at the correct place for buildlink3.mk
and builtin.mk files that previously set USE_X11, and fixes packages
that relied on buildlink3.mk files to implicitly note that X11 is
needed. Package buildlink3.mk should also include x11.buildlink3.mk
when linking against the package libraries requires also linking
against the X11 libraries. Where it was obvious, redundant inclusions
of x11.buildlink3.mk have been removed.
