ABCL 1.8.0

[Mark Evenson]

    ABCL 1.8.0

    Under the gathering storms of the Fall 2020, we are pleased to
    release ABCL 1.8.0 as the Ninth major revision of the
    implementation.

    This Ninth Edition of the implementation now supports building and
    running on the recently released openjdk15 platform.  This release
    is intended as the last major release to support the openjdk6,
    openjdk7, and openjdk8 platforms, for with abcl-2.0.0 we intend to
    move the minimum platform to openjdk11 or better in order to
    efficiently [implement atomic memory compare and swap
    operations][github/issues/92].

    With this release, the implementation of the EXT:JAR-PATHNAME and
    EXT:URL-PATHNAME subtypes of cl:PATHNAME has been fixed to the
    point that arbitrary references to ZIP archives within archives
    now work for read-only stream operations (CL:PROBE-FILE,
    CL:TRUENAME, CL:OPEN, CL:LOAD, CL:FILE-WRITE-DATE, CL:DIRECTORY,
    and CL:MERGE-PATHNAMES).  The previous versions of the
    implementation relied on the ability for java.net.URL to open
    streams of an archive within an archive, behavior that was
    silently dropped after Java 5, and consequently hasn't worked on
    common platforms supported by the Bear in a long time.  The
    overhaul of the implementation restores the feasibility of
    accessing fasls from within jar files.  Interested parties may
    examine the ASDF-JAR contrib for a recipe for packaging and
    accessing such artifacts.  Please consult the ["Beyond ANSI:
    Pathnames" Section 4.2 of the User Manual][manual] for further
    details for how namestrings and components of PATHNAME objects
    have been revised.

    A more comprehensive list of [CHANGES][] is available with the source.


    [1.8.0]: https://abcl.org/releases/1.8.0/
    [asdf-jar]: https://abcl.org/svn/trunk/abcl/contrib/asdf-jar/README.markdown
    [github/issues/92]: https://github.com/armedbear/abcl/issues/92
    [manual]: https://abcl.org/releases/1.8.0/abcl-1.8.0.pdf
    [CHANGES]: https://abcl.org/svn/tags/1.8.0/CHANGES

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