[ESS] Upcoming ESS release 18.10 -- please (beta)test prerelease

[Martin Maechler]

Dear ESS users,

The ESS core team is planning a new release of ESS, 18.10,
before the end of October, possibly in 10 days already.

Whereas some of you may be using the always latest somewhat
unstable development of ESS from MELPA or directly via regular
pull from github, many will use released version, and hence be
using 17.11 (or even an earlier version).

ESS 18.10 will contain parts that have been much re-furbished,
modernized and made future proof, notably thanks to new active
ESS core members Alex Branham and Lionel Henry, and (less new)
Vitalie Spinu, but also quite a few more issue reporters and
pull requesters who have helped improvement.

Because of that, there will also be new bugs, a even known and
postponed to be treated after the release.  Now here you can help us
detect bugs *before* the release by starting to use the pre-release "release
candidate" available from the Prerelease sub folder of the usual
download location

  https://stat.ethz.ch/ESS/downloads/ess/Prerelease/

Newly, we do provide GPG *signed* tar and zip archives; if interested see (1) below.

If you have problems, find bugs, etc please consider using

   https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/issue

both to see if your issue has already been reported and to
open a new issue there.

If you are unsure about new philosophy etc, please use this
mailing list to ask for help etc.

For the ESS core team,

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich



---------------
(1) After download, if you want to check the integrity of say the zip
file, you need to have gpg installed (GPG: = GNU Privacy Guard, the Free
Software version of PGP: https://gnupg.org),
and then in shell (or "a console"),
do once (to get the public key with which I've send the archives)

	gpg --keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 68E0DB0F

and then something like

         gpg --verify ess-18.10.zip.sig  ess-18.10.zip

and you should be told that it is a good signature (from me).