Dear Hugs authors, A new beta release of Hugs98 will be sent out within the next couple of hours. I'm writing to you to clarify what this beta status means. The group of people involved with the maintenance of the Hugs sources is now quite large, and if we also count the maintainers of all software packages that directly depend on Hugs, it's clear that the task of synchronizing all updating and testing that must preceed a new release is quite daunting. Therefore, by releasing a beta version today, I'm hoping to take a short-cut towards the goal of a stable February 2001 release, in the sense that everybody within the Hugs community will have a chance to react to the current changes. This means that there will still be time to polish the sources after today's release, so don't panic when you see the announcement. However, a beta release also means that we're actually freezing the list of features as it stands. That is, no more fancy additions will be considered for the February 2001 release. For purely nostalgic reasons, the target date for the final release is February 14. So please take the time to monitor this beta closely until then, and let the bug reports flow in to hugs-bugs@haskell.org. Or, preferably, make the necessary adjustments to the repository yourselves. All the best, Johan