Release: Abella 2.0.8 Release Candidate 1

[Kaustuv Chaudhuri]

Dear colleagues,

I am putting together a new release of Abella with some major bug fixes over the past year or so, including fixes to a couple of soundness bugs. This is a release candidate that I would like some feedback on in case it affects how you are currently using Abella. The full release will happen in a couple of weeks if there are no show stopping issues.

How to build and use Abella 2.0.8-rc1

Assuming you are using a recent OPAM release (2.1.2+), you can run the following steps in sequence to obtain a fresh install of Abella 2.0.8-rc1.

    # the following is only needed if you don't already have a clone
    $ git clone https://github.com/abella-prover/abella.git

    # otherwise, if you have a clone already, just pull the "master" branch
    $ (cd abella && git pull)

    $ opam pin abella abella
      ... say "yes" when prompted to install it

Later, if you want to stop using this release candidate, you can do the following to go back to the existing 2.0.7 release with:

    $ opam unpin abella

If you want to remove Abella entirely, you can do the following:

    $ opam remove abella
    $ opam unpin abella


What's new in this release candidate

The file CHANGES.md has a summary of all the changes in this release candidate.

In particular, this release will add two new commands:

• abella_doc: Generate HTML versions of complete Abella developments, similar to the official examples on https://abella-prover.org/examples
• abella_dep: Generate parallelizable Makefiles to (re-)compile Abella developments (similar to the -M flag of Abella, which is now deprecated)

The abella_doc program can be asked to recursively (re)create documentation based on the contents of entire directory trees. For instance, the Abella examples on the official web-site were created using:

  abella_doc -r examples

from the topmost directory containing the Abella sources. Use "abella_doc -help" for the full list of options.

In the future, abella_doc will be the canonical way to create HTML pages from Abella sources.

Best regards,

Kaustuv

[Kaustuv Chaudhuri]

Dear colleagues,

Abella 2.0.8 is now released. Please see the changelog for details of this release.

Installing should be as simple as running:

    $ opam unpin abella     # if you pinned the 2.0.8-rc1 pre-release

    $ opam update

    $ opam install abella

We will now move on to the next minor release, 2.1.x, which will merge some features that have been on the backburner too long:

* loading Abella sources from HTTP(S) URLs and from IPFS, related to the current "ipfs" branch

* running Abella inside a browser, related to the "try" branch.

Kaustuv