[racket-dev] 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, it 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.

More immediately, 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