I released Emacspeak 25.0 (ActiveDog) yesterday. Here are the release notes.
While trying to release it on Sourceforge I ran into a couple
of show-stoppers --- first off the SourceForge download mechanism
has changed yet again and it's now gotten sufficiently
convoluted that software released via SourceForge's file release
system is becoming well-nigh impossible to download except for
the most motivated user. Worse, as I released the file, upload
services on SourceForge hung, with a consequence that it created
a 0 sized emacspeak-25.tar.bz2 file --- the
SourceForge mechanism made it well-nigh impossible to clean up
the 0-sized file.
Given this mess, I decided to keep things simple by placing the release on the Emacspeak site directly -- this suffers from the disadvantage of the release not getting mirrored on the various Sourceforge download archives; it has the advantage of allowing users to grab the release with one click.
The other thing to note about this release is that there are
no RPMs built --- a first in 7 years. I've now switched to
Ubuntu on my home machine and dont have the ability to build RPMs
so I'll leave this to individual distributions. I've also not
built Debian packages this time around, mostly because I've not
gotten around to understanding Debian's packaging system
sufficiently well to do this. Moreover I prefer minimalistic
packaging solutions --- and in general though Debian's packaging
is nice, it still feels a little too heavy-weight for something
like the Emacspeak source tarball which needs a simple
make; sudo make install to get set up.
So for now, I'll rely on folks like Jim Van Zandt to build
downstream Debian
packages for incorporating with the various distributions like
Debian and Ubuntu --- this way, packages can be built to match
particular distributions.