Hello Jammers,

This is to announce that we intend to do a new Jam release - 2.5 - prior to the end of this month.

Why a release now, and why without any prior fanfare?

Perforce has decided to begin releasing binary executables of jam for all platforms for which we ship Perforce client software. The first such release will be Perforce 2002.2 (currently in beta, and hopefully to be declared fit for general availability this month). Since the "internal" version of Jam used to build Perforce 2002.2 includes some necessary changes since Jam 2.4 was released, we've decided to:

- Bring the Public Depot sources up-to-date with the "internal" Jam sources. If you're interested in what these are, keep an eye on the RELNOTES file in the Public Depot:

ftp://public.perforce.com/public/jam/src/RELNOTES

- Make this call for additional bug fixes (in my first quick survey of Jam changes in the //guest/... branches to Jam, I didn't spot any such fixes. I'll try to have one more careful look before finalizing the release. If you know of any fixes that are important to you, please bring them to my attention as soon as possible.

- Release the result as Jam 2.5 (source code) in the Public Depot, to match the Jam 2.5 binaries which will become available for download from the Perforce web site.

----- Richard Geiger Open Software Engineer at Perforce