ANNOUNCE: Webstamp 0.7.2 released (unstable branch)

[David Sowder]

We're proud to announce that Webstamp 0.7.2 has been released.  We've 
been sitting on the core changes for way too long.

What's changed:
- We no longer "auto-discover" the values for ROOTDIR, ROOTLIBS, OURDIR, 
OURLIBS and friends at runtime, but instead we do it at "make webify" 
time and store the values in internally used files.  Doing this 
eliminitates the use of readlink() from the PHP code, which didn't seem 
to be stable between PHP releases and/or host environments and OS versions

Remember to use "make upgrade-unstable" to upgrade to this release, 
regardless of what the message for "make upgrade-devel" says (fixed in 
the next release).

You must run "make webify" after upgrading to this release.

This release shouldn't have any stability affecting changes in it, so 
upgrading to this release from stable should be fine, gaining you the 
faster "make webify" and the just added independence from PHP's 
readlink().  Note, however, that future unstable releases may be very 
big changes and this release may have even introduced an unintentional 
bug.  We intend to provide a clean upgrade path through out the 
development process, but sometimes there are surprises.  As always, 
weigh the pros and cons.

Please try to test this release on your platform(s) of choice and let me 
know of _any_ problems.  I'm hoping to motivate myself into a faster 
development release cycle and the sooner I find out about a problem, the 
better.  -David

Still planned for the 0.7.x development cycle (in no particular order 
for priority or likelihood of making it into 0.8.0):
- Complete rework of the tarball directory structure
- Creation of "webstamp" command to replace the current "make 
<command>"  mechanism
- Creation of a webstamp Debian package
- Addition of the concept of a SYSLIBS, etc.
- On system webstamp site registration for upgrade need 
tracking/notification, maybe even automatic upgrades
- Documentation
- Tutorial
- Possible rework of the "make upgrade" mechanism to do upgrade failure 
testing and already at latest version testing
- Separation of the shipped example/template website from the top level 
directory of the tarball
- Generating a list of possible tagfiles in each directory so that 
directories do not have to be readable by the web server anymore (just 
accessible, "x" bit in unix) giving a little security through obscurity
- Look into switching from "{tagname}" to "{{tagname}}"   Feedback 
welcome and encouraged!
- Look into the capability of arguments being passed to dynamic tags 
with perhaps something like "{{tagname(arg1,arg2,arg3)}}"  Feedback 
welcome and encouraged!

-- 
David R. Sowder
Supervisor of Language Acquisition Center
Department of Modern Languages
University of Texas at Arlington
    Work: 817-272-5148  davids@uta.edu    http://langlab.uta.edu/
Personal:               david@sowder.com  http://david.sowder.com/