[MLton] upcoming public release

[Stephen Weeks]

Things are looking pretty good for the upcoming public release.  I ran
tests over the last couple of days to make sure that MLton works on
all our platforms, including our two (or three) new ones for this
release: Darwin, MinGW, OpenBSD.  All our old platforms, plus Darwin,
work fine.  There is a small problem on OpenBSD and some big ones on
MinGW.

The only problem on OpenBSD is the socket regression failure.  For
reference:
	
	http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2004-August/016237.html

I don't consider this blocking for the release, but it would be nice
to fix.  For now, I have documented the problem in the user guide.
Jesper, did you make any progress on this?

The problems on MinGW are more severe.  The FileSys and UnixPath
regressions still fail.  Those are not blocking, however, and could be
documented in the user guide.  What is blocking is the inability to
create a file for saving the world.  We need World.save in order to
build a binary package.  The failure I get is:

	unhandled exception: Fail: MLton.World.save unable to open /tmp/package-mlton-mingw/build/lib/world.mlton due to SysErr: No such file or directory [noent]

The problem has something to do with createf failing, which we
discussed before, but never resolved.  See the thread at:

	http://www.mlton.org/pipermail/mlton/2004-August/016288.html

If we can get this problem resolved in the next couple weeks, I'm
inclined to include the MinGW port in the release.  Brent, can you
look into this?

The only other thing on my list of musts for the release is to split
out the mlb spec from the user guide into a separate document.  Then,
we can live with it as pdf only, although it would be nice to make it
available as html someday.  Matthew, can you do this?

My list of maybes for the release includes:

* The bytecode interpreter.  I've made some progress here, but haven't
  yet begun testing even simple programs.  So, I'm not sure how close
  I am.

* Caching preprocessing of the basis.  Matthew, where are you on this?

I'll put out an experimental release on our eight working platforms
(everything but MinGW) sometime next week.  After that, if all looks
good, we can do a public release three or so weeks after that.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions -- this release is looking
to be a big improvement!