[Everything below assumes you are familiar with the Perforce Public Depot, and its role in the ongoing evolution of Jam. If you care about that, please see

http://public.perforce.com/public/index.html and http://public.perforce.com/public/jam/index.html

for more information.]

Hi all.

I would dearly love to finalize Jam 2.4 by the end of February.

Presently:

- I've integrated all of the Perforce-internal changes into //public/jam/... in the Public Depot.

- I've integrated the handful of the "slam-dunk" changes from various //guest/.../jam/... branches.

- I've also done a bunch of "null-change" integrations, aimed solely at updating the revision history in Perforce, so ease the process of looking for new contributed changes in the future.

- There's been at least one field-contributed bugfix in the last week that's now in the mainline.

- I think I've individually contacted everybody who made changes to //guest/.../jam/... branches, to let you know about that status of your changes WRT 2.4. If anybody out there is thinking "What? why wasn't *I* contacted?", please send me mail at "open...@perforce.com"

- There are several outstanding changes from contributors that we know we want to integrate, though we may want to implement them differently, and I'm not sure whether they will make it into 2.4. I'll probably looking closest at things labeled as "bugfixes" at this point.

- There are some contributed changes yet to be considered; some of these are "major features" (in terms of functionality, at least, if not perhaps code impact): for example the header scan caching stuff. I'm guessing that these won't make it into the 2.4 release, but are still open for consideration in the next release.

(By the way I'd hope that the next release after 2.4 will be able to happen much quicker than 2.4 has followed 2.3).

At this point, I'd like to encourage everybody to grab the current head revisions of //public/jam/..., and give it a go. My own resources for testing across diverse platforms are thin, so I'm hoping that we can shake out major portability problems (or other bugs) by way of your efforts. I.e., I'll do what I can, but if there's a platform you really care about, you can help by trying the current "release candidate" there.

I will try to at least make a statement of the platforms I -expect- it to work on, by next week. I'll also shift to a mode of posting news and status at

http://public.perforce.com/public/jam/index.html

instead of long message (like this) to this list.

In short: the mainline has some significant improvements, which I am aiming to make into the 2.4 release within the month. It's a great time for you to try the head of main and report bugs (or bug me about fixes you've already submitted, that I've missed integrating). The process of getting 2.4 out will have also served as a learning curve for me, which should allow work on 2.5 (3.0?) to progress that much faster.

Finally, thanks to all Jam users and developers out there. I've enjoyed meeting you, and starting to work with you. Your attitude rocks.