[fpc-announce] Release FPC-2.2.2rc1 is available for download

[Mazen NEIFER]

After 9 months of active development and bug fixes, the Free Pascal core
team is proud to announce the availability of the first release
candidate of the expected 2.2.2 compiler.

Users who want to test this release candidate are encouraged to report
bugs and regressions they encounter as soon as possible in order to get
them in next release candidate planned for next month and the final
release possibly before end of August, 2008.

The release candidate packages are available for download in
ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/fpc/beta/2.2.2rc1

The new release contains many bug-fixes and some new features. The
main purpose of this release is to fix problems reported with FPC 2.2.0,
and to remove all potentially tainted code from our source code base.

Please also see http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.2.2 for a list
of changes which may affect the behaviour of previously working code,
and
how to cope with these changes.

Some highlights are:

All:
  *  All code potentially infringing on CodeGear copyrighted code has
been
     reimplemented using a cleanroom approach.

Platforms:
  * Incompatibilities with Mac OS X 10.5's new default linker have been
    resolved.

Compiler:
  * PIC support for Mac OS X (on by default, disable with -Cg-)
  * several bugs in the experimental generics support have been fixed,
    but this feature is still in beta
  * initialisation and finalisation of shared libraries has been fixed
    for all Darwin platforms, and for Linux/i386
  * support for {$packset x} directive to enable set packing
    (use {$packset 1} for Delphi-compatible sets, but note that the
     format is different on little and big endian platforms)

RTL:
  * thread resource leaking under unix has been fixed
  * the widestring manager for unix has been completed
  * several floating point to string conversion errors have been fixed
  * significantly improved variant support
  * implementation of RTL exception handler for OS/2 allowing proper
    translation of some runtime errors
  * various fixes for GO32v2 improving useability of this target
  * OS/2 RTL enhanced to allow seamless working with large files (64-bit
    file system API calls) where available (WSeB/MCP/eCS/Warp 4 with
FP15)

Packages:
  * the Windows API interface units have been significantly updated
  * Apple universal interfaces updated to r234 of the common FPC/GPC/MW
    interfaces

Documentation
  *  Documentation was updated completely to conform to the actual
     state of the compiler and RTL.

See http://bugs.freepascal.org/changelog_page.php for the list of
reported bugs which have been fixed in this release.

FPC Core Team,

Mazen,