> so i guess this is not news?

Does it matter? Despite the name of the site, not everything that is posted/discussed here needs to be "news". Far from it, in fact.

It looks like the latest 1.3.0 release just happened a few days ago, but that isn't clear from (or even stated on) the linked web page.

News to me; I've not heard of it, and I bumble around in the Lisp world.