Just because I'm attending mobile world congress doesn't mean that everything else stops. It's the end of the month, so it must be time to release sbcl. This month's is a little unsatisfying, because we've only achieved one of the two things I'd hoped for: we've been cautious and conservative after last month's landing of the new register allocator, but we haven't sorted out what's going on to cause the less active architectures to fail to build. There are some workarounds that have been mooted; for one reason and another no-one has had the time to check whether they actually work, and while there's partial progress on identifying the root cause of the build failure on sparc it is only partial.

Nevertheless, minor architectures have been broken before, and no-one particularly benefits from not releasing, so 1.1.16 it is. Actually making the release is a little more challenging than usual: I aim to release by the end of the month, and in practice that means it must be done today, 28th February. However, this is the day that I am returning from Barcelona, so I am less in control of laptop power and connectivity than usual for a release day. And to add to the challenge, I am trying this time to address the valid complaints that the binaries built on my laptop don't actually run on released versions of Linux, thanks to the change in the semantics of memcpy (glibc changed the implementation in its version 2.14 to exploit the freedom given to return undefined results if the source and destination overlap) and the behaviour of the linker and versioned symbols.

So over breakfast I dusted off my squeeze chroot (that doesn't sound dodgy at all), and tried to work out how to get a runnable version of SBCL in there at all (answer: build using clisp and link to the chroot's libc). At lunchtime, I used the café's wireless to check for any last-minute changes, and in the airport I found a power socket, so I started the release build. Of course it didn't finish before the gate opened, and in any case I wasn't going to chance uploading sbcl binaries over the free airport wifi (15 minutes, woo!)

I've performed some release stunts before. SBCL 0.9 was released by William Harold Newman and simultaneously announced by me at the first European Common Lisp Meeting in Amsterdam in 2005. Last year, I released SBCL 1.1.8 “live” as part of a lightning talk at the European Lisp Symposium in Madrid. But I think this is the first time that an SBCL release was even partially effected from the air. Next stop, space?