[OS X Emacs] Announcement: release of beta version of Aquamacs 3.6

[Win Treese]

I am pleased to announce a beta release of Aquamacs 3.6, available at

https://aquamacs.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Aquamacs-3.6-beta.dmg

This release has fixes for many of the reported crashes and other bugs, particularly for crashes on Catalina and Big Sur. Aquamacs now prompts for needed permissions. The Aquamacs app is now fully signed and notarized by Apple. Several of the bundled Emacs Lisp packages have been updated to more recent versions, most notably AUCTeX.

This version also include native support for libxml2 as well as JPEG and SVG images.

This release is compiled to run on any Mac OS version from El Capitan (10.11) forward.

At the moment, the 3.6 is compiled only for the x86 architecture. It seems to run fine on Apple Silicon system with Rosetta. I'm going to try building it on Apple Silicon during the beta period.

Known problems:
- The help system doesn't work properly at first. Usually, Mac OS seems to build an index for it that works later. The out-of-the-box setup should work better in the final version of 3.6.

For anyone interested in hacking on Aquamacs or building it themselves, the build system has been refactored somewhat to make it easier to build for personal use. Look in the aquamacs/build directory to find the scripts that do the work.

If there are no major issues, I expect the final release of 3.6 to be in late June or early July.

Aquamacs 3.6 will likely be the last release based on Emacs 25. Beyond 3.6, Aquamacs will be updated to run with a fairly recent version of Emacs 27 or Emacs 28, depending on when the development catches up. The merge to catch up with current Emacs will probably take a while, although there's been a lot of behind-the-scenes work to set the stage for that.

Please report any problems by email to aquamacs-bugs at aquamacs.org, or on github at https://github.com/aquamacs-emacs/aquamacs-emacs/issues.

Some of you have asked about donations. Thanks for your interest in supporting Aquamacs development. The project paused donations with the change in maintainers, and something new may be set up after the 3.6 final release is available. If you would like to be notified about that, please email me separately.