[Omake] Announcing OMake 0.9.8.3; pre-announcing OMake 0.9.9

[Aleksey Nogin]

We are proud to announce the latest release of the OMake Build System - 
OMake 0.9.8.3 ("stable") and pre-announce that OMake 0.9.9 ("unstable") 
is expected to be released within a week.

OMake 0.9.8.3 is a minor feature enhancements and bugfixes release. The 
changes in OMake 0.9.8.3 include:

  * The 3-place rules are now considered implicit and will be inherited
    by subdirectories. This makes it easier to declare default rules for
    common targets, such as

         clean: %:
            rm -f ...

  * Allow .PHONY sections to have a body. A .PHONY declaration with a
    body would create a default (implicit) rule for the newly created
    phony target(s).

  * Detect case-insensitive filesystems on Unix-like operating systems
    (especially common under Mac OS X). This should make it possible to
    use OCAMLDEP_MODULES_ENABLED=true under Unix-like operating systems
    with case-insensitive filesystems.

  * Changed the default value for the OCAMLDEP_MODULES_ENABLED to
    $(OCAMLDEP_MODULES_AVAILABLE). In other words, ocamldep -modules will
    be used whenever it is available (e.g. under OCaml 3.10 or if the
    bytecode executable distributed with OMake can be used).

  * A number of performance improvements. In particular, the size of the
    .omakedb should now be significantly smaller.

  * Documentation improvements

OMake 0.9.9 will feature a large number of major changes that Jason 
Hickey have been working on for the last two years. These changes include:

  * Completely redesigned variable naming semantics aimed at making sure
    that similarly named unrelated variables from different source
    files do not clash.

  * Optional ("keyword") arguments to functions.

  * An option to use an alternative "programming-language-style" syntax,
    where all string constants have to be quoted, but variable and
    function references do not have to use the $(...) syntax.

  * Dynamic loading of C libraries, including:

    - Tools for automated creation of OCaml wrappers to C libraries by
      parsing the C header files.

    - As an example, _automatically generated_ OCaml and OMake wrappers
      for the GTK library.

       - As a demo for the above, an OMake GUI capable of presenting a
         browseable dependency tree, and much more.

  * And many other features (much more complete and detailed list will
    accompany the release).

For more information on OMake, please visit the OMake Home Page at 
http://omake.metaprl.org/

Source and binary packages of OMake 0.9.8.3 may be downloaded from 
http://omake.metaprl.org/download.html. In addition, OMake may be 
obtained via the GODI packaging system.

Even though we call it "stable", OMake 0.9.8.3 should still be 
considered an alpha release. While we have made an effort to ensure that 
it is bug-free, it is possible some functions may not behave as you 
would expect. Please report any comments and/or bugs to the mailing list 
omake at metaprl.org and/or at http://bugzilla.metaprl.org/

-- 
Aleksey Nogin, Research Scientist
Advanced Technologies Department, Information & System Sciences Lab
HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, CA