[Racket announcement] Today's DrRacket problem

Dear Racket users, 

Many of you noticed that DrRacket v5.2.1 refused to launch today,
March 26.  We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

The problem is due to a so-called "Easter egg", which is a visual
surprise that one developer builds into the code for the others and
our users -- a tradition going back to the early days of our
project. The bug affects only DrRacket, no other Racket software.

As far as version 5.2.1 is concerned, the bug will disappear tomorrow,
but it will return later this year.  For the upcoming release -- due
out before the next "easter egg" date -- we will either install much
more reliable test methods for the Easter eggs or we will remove them
entirely.

We intend to make a fixed version of 5.2.1 available later today. In
the meantime, we offer the following workarounds for the DrRacket bug:

* Revert to version 5.2:

     http://download.racket-lang.org/racket-v5.2.html

* In your current installation of 5.2.1, navigate to the following
  folder:

     collects -> drracket -> private 

  remove the file

     drracket-normal.rkt

  and replace it with the corrected copy at

     http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/fix/drracket-normal.rkt

* For those of you with commandline tool experience, download a Racket
  patch file from

     http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/fix/patch-for-v5.2.1.plt

  navigate in your shell to the folder with the 5.2.1 executables, and
  install the patch with

    ./raco setup -A ....

  where .... specifies a path to the downloaded file.

As much as we prepare and test these Easter eggs, software obeys only
one law: what can go wrong will go wrong eventually. We definitely
should have been more careful.

Once again, we regret any problems we caused you today

-- Matthias Felleisen, for PLT