Aladdin Ghostscript tester / beta filesets

If you have already read this document and just want to get the most recent tester / beta fileset, you can always find it on:

• ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin/test/ (central U.S.A., primary copy)
• ftp://www.aladdin.com/ghost/aladdin/test/ (northern California)
• ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/support/ghostscript/aladdin/test/ (Germany)
• ftp://elza.lpi.ru/pub/ghost/aladdin/test/ (Russia)

The most valuable thing you can do to help improve Ghostscript is to help test it. Aladdin makes three different grades of release available, each of which needs a different kind of testing.

• Public releases are made available about every 9 months, after a beta test period.

• Beta releases are posted starting about 6 weeks before a planned public release. These are candidates for public release, and need intensive testing.

• Tester releases are posted every few weeks. These are not supposed to be good enough for general use, but testing them is still very helpful, since it gets problems corrected before the intensive beta test period.

If you test Ghostscript, please always report problems by using the problem reporting form doc/Bug-form.htm that is included with Ghostscript. It saves a lot of time and e-mail if we can get all the necessary information right away.

• If the problem is in a tester release, and you got a precompiled Windows executable from the test directory, e-mail the filled-out form to the bug-gswin mailbox at Aladdin.

• In all other cases, e-mail the filled-out form to Aladdin's bug-gs mailbox.

(We don't provide mailto links or actual e-mail addresses above because they would be quickly harvested by spammers.)

If you would like to be notified when new tester or beta releases are posted, please fill out the short questionnaire on the file doc/Tester.htm that is included with Ghostscript, and e-mail the result to Aladdin's ghost mailbox.

Note that tester and beta releases differ from public releases in certain ways other than schedule:

• Tester and beta releases are distributed only in source code form, unlike public releases which include pre-compiled PC and Mac executables. If you want to work with these releases on PC or Mac platforms, you will need one of the compilers that Ghostscript is prepared to work with (Borland, Microsoft, or Watcom on the PC platform; MetroWerks on the Mac). For all other platforms, we recommend gcc, although Ghostscript should build with any standard C compiler.

• Tester and beta releases do not include the freely available libraries that Ghostscript uses. See below for information about how to get these.

• Tester releases often include significant features that are not yet in public releases: for example, a nearly complete implementation of PostScript LanguageLevel 3 was available in a tester release in February 1999, over 6 months before a public release.

• New header files and APIs in tester releases are generally less stable than those in public releases.

• Tester and beta releases identify themselves as such when they are started. This is so that users understand what kind of release they have and what quality they should expect.

• Tester and beta releases are distributed only with the Aladdin Free Public License, unlike public releases which are eventually distributed with the GNU General Public License and are also made available for commercial licensing.

Tester and beta filesets do not include the IJG JPEG library, the PNG library, or the zlib library. The most recent released versions of these libraries are always available from the following places:

• IJG JPEG library:

  	ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v*.tar.gz
  

• PNG library:

  	ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/png/src/libpng-*.tar.gz or lpng*.zip
  

• zlib:

  	ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/zlib/zlib-*.tar.gz or zlib*.zip.
  

Possibly slightly out-of-date copies of these libraries are also available from ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/3rdparty/.

Note: Please don't distribute tester or beta filesets outside your own organization (i.e., to anyone you don't know personally). We (Aladdin) won't answer questions from, or accept test reports from, anyone who got the code from anywhere other than this site or the mirrors listed above. The Aladdin Free Public License does allow you to redistribute these filesets, but since they aren't fully tested, we really want to limit their redistribution to people who will test them diligently.