XEmacs 21.5.36 "leeks" is released.

*          XEmacs 21.5.36 "leeks" is released.
      "leeks" is the thirty-seventh in the VEGETABLE series.

This is a point release to get important functionality out. Important changes
are thorough support for address space layout randomization and removal of the
previous approach to incorporating the dump file by binary-patching XEmacs,
both needed to have XEmacs run successfully on recent macOS. Equally important
is Kurt Geisel's work to get XEmacs building successfully on recent Visual Studio.

Other changes include Richard Hopkins’ work to greatly improve color support
on TTYs, incorporation of GNU code that removes the need for an internal
register number for shy groups and speeds up regex matching when two branches
are mutually exclusive, better circularity checking with regular expressions,
speed-ups for important coding systems when dealing with ASCII input,
reduction in the number of function calls needed at normal startup by moving
more data to the dump file, greatly increasing the robustness of module
unloading, elimination of many memory leaks by moving subr and
symbol-value-magic objects from the data segment to the dump file (where they
had already been).

This is the development line.  The current series started with XEmacs
21.5.0 (an alias for XEmacs 21.4.0 "Solid Vapor", the first release in
the current stable line).  21.5 is the code base for introduction of
major new subsystems and fixes to design bugs that experience shows will
introduce instability.  So far the main effort has been on improved
support for Unicode, updates to the build infrastructure, and development
of new features in memory allocation.

For general information about XEmacs, the developers, and the user
community, see our home page,

       http://www.xemacs.org/

* XEmacs 21.5.36 is "beta" software.

The usual "no warranty" disclaimer (see etc/COPYING, sections 10 and 11)
applies.  At this point in time, it is the version that most developers
are using for their daily work.  However, it is certain that many bugs
remain and new ones will be introduced as development proceeds.  Be sure
to take care to save your work often and follow a regular backup regime.

* Availability

Anonymous ftp:

             ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.5

See http://www.xemacs.org/Install/ for more information about building
from source.

Also, if you don't have the packages yet, see

        http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/packageGuide.html.

Mercurial repository:

              https://foss.heptapod.net/xemacs/xemacs

This is a read-only Mercurial repository.  To check out XEmacs 21.5.36,
use the command

    hg clone -r r21-5-36 https://foss.heptapod.net/xemacs/xemacs

to create a new Mercurial workspace, or

                        hg pull -u -r r21-5-36

if you already have a local workspace from Mercurial.  To update to the
most recent commits to the official repository, use

                            hg pull -u tip

For more details, see

             http://www.xemacs.org/Develop/hgaccess.html

Changes in XEmacs 21.5.36 “leeks”

Major Features, Bugfixes, and Backward Incompatible Changes

-- Improve: Remove option of non-Mule builds, given stability of Mule code -- Aidan Kehoe
-- New: Thorough support for address space layout randomization, ASLR -- Aidan Kehoe
-- New: Much better support for colors on TTYs -- Richard Hopkins
-- New: Add support for anchors within info.el -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Use POSIX type instead of which(1) -- Mats Lidell
-- Fix: Avoid segmentation violation with functions that assumed a window, -batch -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Get XEmacs building with recent Visual Studio -- Kurt Geisel
-- Fix: Extensive changes to make module support more robust, reduce crashes with unloaded modules -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: No longer binary-patch xemacs with DUMP_IN_EXEC, fix signed binaries -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Remove support for byte-compile-dynamic (though not byte-compile-dynamic-docstrings) -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Remove need for an internal register number, shy groups -- Aidan Kehoe, Stefan Monnier
-- Improve: Add support for \_<, \_> to regex.c, anchor at symbol begin, end -- Aidan Kehoe, Alan Mackenzie
-- Improve: Remove the PACKAGE_SUPPRESS mechanism from XEmacs, which was confusing and never worked well  -- Alan  Makenzie

User-Visible Bug Fixes and Improvements

-- Fix: Restore the skip_ascii() optimization, no-conversion, utf-8, multibyte coding systems -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix multiple bugs and performance issues with shifted motion especially on terminals -- Aidan Kehoe, Richard Hopkins
-- Improve: Make algorithm choice more consistent, #'find, #'position -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Print modifiers for motion, misc-user events; systematize modifier handling -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Avoid a conflict with our headers and Motif for XFT builds -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Avoid command-execution vulnerabilities, etags.c -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Fix a bug with slider size and buffer-position based scrolling -- Aidan Kehoe, Richard Hopkins
-- Improve: Support Page Up/Page Down, Insert, Delete keys with modifiers on Xterm -- Richard Hopkins
-- Improve: If PROMPT supplied to #'read-char, echo it and the result briefly -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Be more careful about the buffer-local status of `inhibit-read-only' -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Avoid calling xfree() on dumped data, resize_string(); fix bugs -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Install DOC as DOC-DUMP_ID, avoid corruption after make install -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Give reasonable defaults for Perl, Mercurial and makeinfo, native Windows -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Make initial obarray larger, reduce leaking of its entries -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Call optimize_compiled_function() on every compiled function when dumping, improve performance, reduce leaked memory -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Avoid O(N) behavior, #'compare-buffer-substrings -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Add support for fseeki64(), ftelli64() on Windows -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Purge the PACKAGE_SUPPRESS mechanism from XEmacs -- Alan Mackenzie
-- Improve: Support text/plain, text/plain;charset=utf-8 when cutting and pasting under X11 -- Aidan Kehoe

Build Infrastructure and Source Tree

-- Fix: Fix a build rule that did not work with BSD make(1) -- Richard Hopkins
-- Improve: ANSI C function definitions, lib-src/ -- Richard Hopkins
-- Improve: Avoid GC after loading every file with --with-quick-build -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Default DUMP_IN_EXEC to 0 when --with-quick-build -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Only search in two places for xemacs.dmp when DUMP_IN_EXEC is 0, improve security -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Install dump file in ${archlibdir} if DUMP_IN_EXEC 0 -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Import incbin.h, allow cross-platform inlining of binary data -- Aidan Kehoe, Dale Weiler
-- Fix: Remove obsolete optimization flags, Windows build -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Find module auto-autoloads in module build tree, not source tree -- Stephen J. Turnbull
-- Improve: Simplify startup now unexec is gone, move much more objects to the dump file (ongoing) -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Correct the updating of the syntax cache in re_match_2_internal -- Alan Mackenzie
-- Improve: Remove support for building modules into temacs -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Remove some obsolete or minimally useful C files from lib-src/ -- Aidan Kehoe

Documentation

-- Document removal of PACKAGE_SUPPRESS Makefile target -- Alan Mackenzie
-- Document removal of support for building modules into temacs -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Reduced restrictions on C code now unexec is gone -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Update emodules.texi to reflect current status -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Document new optional TEST argument, #'assoc -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Document new optional TEST argument, #'assoc -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Update info syntax -- Aidan Kehoe, Mats Lidell, Richard Hopkins
-- Clarify some syntax related to regexp character sets, groups, zero-length shy groups -- Aidan Kehoe

-- Update documentation of Qunbound, now it is of type opaque -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Update and correct some documentation of pdump -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Update documentation of current dumping, marking -- Aidan Kehoe

Lisp API

-- Improve: Take GNU's optional TEST argument, #'assoc -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Correct the result of #'regexp-opt when passed an empty list -- Alan Mackenzie
-- Improve: Remove support for emacs implementations without #'add-timeout, itimer.el -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Handle GNU's value `symbols' of the PAREN argument to regexp-opt -- Alan Mackenzie

Internal API and Implementation

-- Improve: Make Qunbound into an opaque object, simplify symbols.c -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Fix: Prevent scan_sexps_forward interpreting very large argument as -1 -- Alan Mackenzie
-- Fix: Handle the %t modeline spec properly once more -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Add KEYWORDS as a value for struct Lisp_Subr.max_args, use it -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Choose test based on type of key argument for find_htentry(), elhash.c -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Make #'true-list-p, #'safe-length 15% faster -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Make staticpro() work with heap addresses -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Modernize loadhist.el, use structured errors, #'file-system-ignore-case-p -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Add {define,undef}_lisp_object(), encapsulate creating lrecord types -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Improve: Add dump_add_nil_lisp_object(), staticpro_dump_nil(). Use them -- Aidan Kehoe

Testing and Debugging

-- Test symbol boundary anchors -- Aidan Kehoe, Alan Mackenzie
-- Check that compiled functions supplied as arguments to (interactive ...) in lambdas are not doubly-compiled -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Test detection of coding cookies -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Test #'compare-buffer-substrings -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Move code testing unicode-error-default-translation-table, unicode-invalid-sequence-regexp-range here -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Test #'call-interactively -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Test resize_string() with big, small strings -- Aidan Kehoe
-- Test colors are read and scaled correctly -- Richard Hopkins
-- Test shifted motion handling -- Aidan Kehoe

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out / How your
man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’ (C. Moore)