Dear XOTcl Community,

XOTcl 1.5.6 is available. This version is mostly a fix release for
some problems that were apparently quite long in the code and could
cause crashes for threaded applications.

best regards
-gustaf neumann

Announcing XOTcl 1.5.6
*************************

We are pleased to announce the availability of XOTcl 1.5.6.

Major changes relative to 1.5.4 are:

   * Fixes for treating global volatile objects (many thanks to Zoran
     for his concise reports). The problem was that XOTcl uses
     C-level var traces containing object pointers to objects.
     If for some reason, these objects are destroyed earlier, this
     results in dangling references. This problem caused especially
     problems in the automatic cleanup of variables at the end 
     of a thread.

   * Fix for Tcl 8.4.* for situations, where Tcl variables
     contained references to deleted XOTcl objects. The problem
     was introduced by the VarReform changes between 1.5.3 and
     1.5.4 by a bad side effect of a Tcl_Obj based command 
     to look up Tcl command structurs. The problem did not 
     exist for xotcl compiled against Tcl 8.5 and is as well
     fixed on the Tcl side in CVS (might become available,
     when one more Tcl 8.4 release is eventually released)

   * Serializer:
      - Added dependency rule in serializer to ensure slots of
        super-classes are listed before subclasses. (Thanks to Stefan
        Sobernig for reporting the problem)

     - Moved deactivation of traces into "Serializer all"
        to get simpler results on "o serialize".

   * Extended regression tests


 For more details about the changes, please consult the ChangeLog and
 documentation.

MORE INFO
  General and more detailed information about XOTcl and its components
  can be found at http://www.xotcl.org

