[fpc-devel]New release and IOI

[Tom Verhoeff]

A couple of days back I sent a message to this list, but I have not
seen it being distributed.  Was it lost in the ISP move?

Anyway, I'll try to reconstruct it.

Last year, the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) started
using open source compilers in their competition (FreePascal 1.0.4 and
GCC 2.95.2).  At IOI2001 in Finland, about 50% of approximately 250
participants used Pascal.  As a consequence, FreePascal is also used in
many of the national and regional informatics olympiads, which together
have a much larger participation.

IOI2002 will be held in Korea from August 18 to 25.  There will be
a review meeting that inspects all of the competition material (e.g.
tasks and tools) from May 12 to 17.

Is any information available on when a 1.0.6 bug-fix release can be
expected?  (Or 1.2)

I would be very much in favor of using a newer release because it
repairs a number of bugs.  You can imagine that we would prefer not to
base the competition on some (arbitrary) 1.0.5 snapshot (even though it
may be better than the current 1.0.4).  This would give rise to all
kinds of difficulties (which version is the exact official IOI version;
who decides whether it is sufficiently stable, etc.).

Is there any way in which we can influence or help in this matter?

Best regards,

	Tom Verhoeff
	Chair IOI Scientific Committee
	http://olympiads.win.tue.nl/ioi/sc/