Chronos Version B1.120 Published
Chronos Version B1.120 has been publised ("Beta Release 1--build 120".) Chronos B1.120 is available for VisualWorks only--although the Chronos Seed Archive for B1.120 is also available (the "Chronos Seed" is the platform-independent Chronos codebase, used for porting Chronos from VisualWorks to other Smalltalk pltatforms.) The Squeak version (maintained by Avi Bryant) hasn't changed.
Chronos Version B1.120 can be obtained from the Chronos Web Site, or from the Cincom Public StORE Repository. Or you can use the direct download link.
You should also obtain and install the latest version of the Chronos Time Zone Repository, according to the Chronos Installation Instructions. Otherwise, much of Chronos' time zone functionality will not be available. The latest version of the Chronos Time Zone Repository provides additional data about time zones that was absent from earlier versions. The new data will be invisible to versions of Chronos previous to B1.120. Version B1.120 can use older versions of the Chronos Time Zone Repository--but some of the new functionality will be disabled in that case.
About Chronos Version B1.120
Version B1.120 includes a few bug fixes, some new functionality, and most importantly a significantly-improved design/implementation of the infrastructure for accessing persistent/remote resources (such as time zone rule sets.) The goal of this redesign is to enable accessing time zone rule sets, time zone localization policies, locale data and holiday rule definitions from reference data servers over the internet (or perhaps just over a LAN from an organization's own private servers.)
New functionality includes default zone names (in English only) for about 75 of the most commonly used time zones (e.g., "Eastern Time" for "America/New_York") and geographic coordinates for most Olson time zones.
Finally, I have further refined Chronos's ability to handle reinstallation/reinitialization of a new version on top of an already-installed earlier version. This not only makes it easier to change versions (there is no need to migrate one's whole codebase to a new image, nor to first uninstall the old version of Chronos before installing the new version--provided one uses a version/module manager such as StORE; file-ins always require deinstallation of the old Chronos version before filing-in a new version,) it also makes it easier to do significant refactorings of the Chronos codebase.
I highly recommend using Chronos version B1.120 as a "waypoint" for migrating from earlier versions of Chronos to later versions. The testing I have done gives me great confidence that StORE can be used to do a live update to version B1.120 from any previous version of Chronos. Such may not always be the case for future versions. From this point forward, I will only be testing for StORE updatability from version B1.120 and later to future versions, and do not guarantee that versions prior to B1.120 will be hot-swappable (using StORE) with versions later than B1.120.
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