Emdros is developed in two parallel source trees: A 1.1 series, and a 1.2.0.preXYZ series. The 1.1 series was started in 2001, and has enjoyed at least 22 releases. The current version is 1.1.22, which was released on February 8, 2005. That's more than a year and a half ago as of this writing. The 1.2.0.preXYZ series was branched off around 1.1.12, which was released on July 7, 2003. The 1.2.0.preXYZ series was intended as a "preview" series of "what was to come". Little did I know that I would be developing these "previews" for more than three years, and that I would produce as many as 217 previews, not all of which were made public. The awful truth is, I should have released 1.2.0 long ago, but I've kept pushing it off into the future because "I just wanted that feature to go in, or I would like to have just that bug squashed, or I would love to see that architectural blemish removed". It's a bit like writing a PhD thesis: You want to polish it and make sure that all cracks are tightened, and that it looks good, and that every reference is completely and properly cited, and -- oh, by the way -- those footnotes had better be copious enough, and did I really check that reference carefully enough? At some point, you just have to let go of your baby. I hope I'll be a responsible enough "parent" that I do that soon with the 1.2.0.preXYZ series. It probably will not be released as version 1.2.0, since so much development has gone into it that it's going to be more like version 2.0.

The other awful truth is, the 1.1 series is old, lackluster in performance and features, and will be put on hold shortly. Today I fixed two outstanding bugs in it, and did some release-engineering, making sure it compiles on recent Linuxes and on Solaris 10. I still need to do the release engineering on Win32, but once that is done, you can expect 1.1.23 to be out faster than you can say "Take me to the download page." Unfortunately, this will also be the last release in the 1.1 series, unless someone finds serious security vulnerabilities in it, report them to me, and tell me that the 1.1 series is important to them, in which case I will consider fixing the vulnerability. But the 1.1 series is dead as far as development is concerned, has long been dead, and -- truth be told -- I wish nobody used it.

Please drop me a line if you use Emdros. It's always nice to hear from users.

Ulrik
ulrikp|write-the-sign|emdrosparis|do-t|org

(Remove the French city, by the way.)