It's kind-of official. This is the last beta release of the 2.0 mainline.
Everything that should be in 2.0.0 is in, and seems to work... at least on our
end.

>From now on, it's focussing on polishing and see if it survives the RTT
developer's workshop in Barcelona. I'm betting it will.

These are the mandatory links:

http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~orocos/pub/devel/rtt/v1.99.4/
-> RTT Downloads and online documentation. Especially: 'orocos-components-
manual' and 'orocos-rtt-plugins'

http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~orocos/pub/devel/ocl/v1.99.4/
-> OCL Downloads and online documentation.

Please test it on your platform (mac/windows/...). Bugs reported this week and
next week will go into 2.0.0-rc1, which will be released after the developer's
meeting. Big additions that come up during the dev meeting are probably food
for 2.2.0.

These are the noteworthy RTT changes compared to beta3:

* Improvement in compilation time : 15% faster
Probably a lot more in case you don't have much ram.
* Improvement in code size: 20% smaller in Release build.
* So it should now build on those 'lesser' systems with only a few GB of RAM.
* Added reacting to calls on *own* operations in scripting state machines.
This replaces reacting to RTT::Event in 1.x apps
* Cleanup of AtomicQueue, Buffer and DataObject APIs.
* Rename of 'getPart*' to 'getMember*' in data source decomposition API
(internal)
* Reworked the component lifecycle as discussed on orocos-dev. C++ Exceptions
cause a transition to the 'Exception' state. There is a RunTimeError state and
a FatalError state.
* Merged the win32 porting patches of Jean Sreng
* On MS Windows, Debug libraries will have the 'd' suffix
* Fixed a major issue (crash) during marshalling/demarshalling of properties
* A bunch of unused internal classes or functions have been removed

In OCL, these are:
* Install loadable components in lib/orocos, keep taskbrowser and deployment
components in lib/ as plain libraries.
* Improve logging of why plugins&components are loaded or not
* Add a createStream() script function + allow to create streams from XML
deployment files. A stream is a connection with one component port on one end
and a non-RTT sender/receiver on the other end.
* All reported issues (on/off list) of component and plugin loading have been
fixed
* Fixed the data flow output port of TimerComponent.

Also the rtt-exercises have been updated. You can get them through

git clone git://github.com/psoetens/orocos-rtt-examples.git

The 'simple-examples' are not up to date yet and won't work.

Also left to be done:
* Updates to the orocos-installation manual
* Create a better 'getting started with 2.0' document that explains how to do
stuff with the deployer and go from there.
* Create a clear '2.0' space where you can find all examples, documentation
etc.
* Compile the big 'rtt-changes' list to point out as much as possible what
changed and links to more details.
* Provide new templates for project/component generation, ros-style, to
startup creating components from scratch faster.

None of these are show stoppers for the final release if they aren't fully
finished yet. We'll have the usual round of bugfix releases to sort rough edges
out.

If you got upto here, it should be done compiling already :-)

Peter