root/trunk/thirdparty/distel/NEWS

Jungerl version:

        When you type the opening '(' for a function call Distel will
        try to show the function's argument list(s) in the echo area.
        (Very nice feature by Martin Björklund.)

        If you want to choose a new node to talk to then use
        `erl-choose-nodename' (C-c C-d n). Now C-u is just a regular
        prefix argument and not a node-chooser.

        The default remote node name is now displayed in the modeline.

        The 'dec32' helper C program no longer exists! Thanks Dave
        Love for reimplementing it in Elisp using floats (and doing a
        whole slew of cleanups besides).

        Distel now tricks R10B-0 into thinking that it can support
        extended pids. This allows distribution to be established. Of
        course it would be better to really support them :-)

Version 3.3:

        A User Manual is now available from the homepage,
        http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/distel/

        'fdoc' online docmentation is now included, with "C-c C-d d"
        and "C-c C-d a" to do "describe" and "apropos",
        respectively. 'fdoc' is a program for automatically extracting
        documentation from the comments in source files - it primarily
        exists in the Jungerl.

        Refactoring support now exists, with a command to take an
        expression from a function and "refactor" it into a separate
        sub-function. Distel automatically passes the appropriate
        variables to the new function by using the 'syntax_tools'
        package to analyse the expression. This feature requires
        'syntax_tools' version 1.2 to be installed separately.

        Breakpoint handling in the debugger has been improved in many
        small ways. There is also an extra keybinding for toggling
        breakpoints, "C-x SPC", for consistency with other Emacs
        packages.

        Giving a numeric prefix argument to M-. will force it to
        prompt for the function to lookup. This is useful if you want
        to find the source for a function that isn't being called in
        any code that you have handy. You can give it a numeric prefix
        with e.g. "M-1 M-."

Version 3.2:

        Completion of module and function names. So list:keyso
        completes to lists:keysort, etc. Bound to M-TAB and (since
        some window managers take that) M-?. Also has popups for
        ambiguous completions and all that good stuff.
        (Thanks Mikael Karlsson for suggesting this often enough that
        it finally sunk in :-))

        Major debugger extensions by Martin Björklund:

        - Visual breakpoints: lines with breakpoints set are now
          highlighted in red. If the buffer is modified, the
          breakpoints turn purple to indicate that they may be out of
          sync with the line numbers in the Erlang node. Once editing
          is finished at the code is reloaded, the breakpoints can be
          resynchronized with C-c C-d s.

          Note that using "l(module)" in the shell seems to go behind
          the debugger's back, so to reload an interpreted module you
          should use either C-c C-d L in Emacs, or i(...) in the
          shell.

        - Save (C-c C-d S) and Restore (C-c C-d R) of debugger state
          (set of interpreted modules and breakpoints.) This can be
          used to temprarily save your debug settings while restarting
          a node, etc. The settings are stored inside Emacs.

        Group for Customization (M-x customize), so customizable
        variables can be configured interactively. It's in
        Programming->Tools->Distel.

        More faithful tags-compliance (i.e. prompting for which tag to
        follow after M-.) optionally available, via the (Customizable)
        `distel-tags-compliant' variable (Martin Björklund.)

        Distel commands now appear in the Erlang pull-down menu
        (Martin Björklund)

        Improved "Interactive Session" support. Now C-j evaluates the
        previous expression and inserts the result in-line, and C-M-x
        evaluates a function definition and prints the result as a
        message. The binding for creating/showing a session is now 
        C-c C-d e.

        Improved process-manager support, with many small UI
        enhancements: 'u' updates the list, 'k' kills a process, fewer
        buffers are created, better errors when inspecting dead
        processes, ... (thanks Martin Björklund and Mats Cronqvist)

        EXIT signals are now generated for remote processes when the
        link goes down. This solves some long-standing problems like
        the debug monitor hanging if you restart the node you were
        debugging on.

        Option to explicitly set a cookie in the variable
        `derl-cookie' (Mats Cronqvist)

        Now you can connect several Emacsen to the same Erlang node,
        because Distel now uses a unique distel_<pid>@<host> node name
        for each Emacs.

Version 3.1:

        Compatibility with R9.

        New and incompatible pattern syntax:
          [foo Bar] becomes ['foo bar].
        In other words, symbols without quotes are now variables, even
        if they're lower case.

        References can now be sent and received, and also created with
        (erl-make-ref).

        Greatly improved support for helping the debugger find the
        code for the modules you want to interpret, courtesy of Mats
        Cronqvist <etxmacr@cbe.ericsson.se>.

        Automated bug reporting with "M-x report-distel-problem",
        which generates an email template addressed to the mailing
        list, populated with some trace information.

        M-. (erl-find-source-under-point) doesn't RPC on local
        function lookups, making it faster. M-* now does the same as
        M-, (jump back from a function definition), since it is more
        consistent with TAGS. (M-, still works too.)

Version 3.0:

        Lots and lots and lots.

        Dynamic TAGS, debugger, profiler, shell-cum-scratchpad, and
        generally "end-user" applications.
        
        Substantial improvements to the programming interface too,
        particularly eliminating the ugly `tuple' tag.

        Thanks are due to David Wallin (!), Torbjörn Törnkvist, and
        Darius Bacon (so far..) for hacks and ideas, and all the good
        sports here at Bluetail for beta testing :-)

Version 2.0:

        Major additions are pattern matching and `erl-receive'. This
        has simplified the programming interface a lot, making
        `erl-mailbox' become undocumented and `erl-continue' be
        reclassified as an ``internal'' function. All existing
        programs can be updated to be much neater. The actual changes
        are backwards compatible, even though some things have
        disappeared from the documentation.

        Ported to XEmacs (21.1).

        Many thanks to Vladimir Sekissov, Darius Bacon, and Vlad
        Dumitrescu for code and advice on this release.