Beta release rc-1.5b4

[Tim Goodwin <tjg@star.le.ac.uk>]

I am delighted to announce, at long last, a new beta release of rc.
I've attached the NEWS file from the release below.

This is, I hope, a stable, solid release.  I would encourage everyone to
use it, and let me know if there are any problems that I've missed.

You can obtain it from here.

    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/beta/rc-1.5b4.tar.gz

Or, if you don't have gzip handy, the uncompressed tarball is here.

    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/beta/rc-1.5b4.tar

If you are unable to use HTTP to obtain rc, please let me know and we'll
figure out some way to get it to you.

Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to this release, by
suggesting ideas, contributing code, or giving feedback on snapshot
releases.

Tim.


Since rc-1.5b2 was released, many fixes have been made to the
autoconfiguration code, some of them critical.  One problem (which I
introduced) was found in minutes with ElectricFence: I had spent several
hours failing to find it with other tools.

Two bugs in rc itself, one of them trivial, were fixed.

rc now uses GNU automake.  Although I feel that automake is sticking
plaster to mend a broken leg, it has made my job as maintainer easier.
(Errm, apart from tracking down bugs in automake itself, and Perl, that
is.)  For people building rc, it's now possible (depending on your
flavour of `make') to build in a separate directory from the source.

Creeping featurism: rc now has a `-V' switch to report its version
number.

The detection of signal names has been completely revised.  Vincent
Broman suggested this, and contributed mksignal.c.

The interaction with readline has been redone, principally to work
around bugs in the readline library.  Tom Culliton persuaded me of
the need for this, and his patches to an earlier version of rc became
readline.c.

I rewrote addon.[ch] to provide a more useful example of adding extra
builtins.

The rc build system no longer considers running `yacc': parse.y is for
information only.  The supplied y.tab.[ch] were built with Berkeley
`yacc', and lightly edited to remove a few gcc warnings.  This idea was
suggested by Gert-Jan Vons.

Binaries of rc-1.5b4 are typically a few kilobytes smaller than 1.5b2.
I believe this is due to improved autoconfiguration: we are now much
more careful only to include code that will be used.

Support for vrl (another lightweight "readline"-style library) was
added.

rc can now deal with a bogus application that sets its stdin to
non-blocking mode.

See ChangeLog for more details.

What happened to rc-1.5b3?  There were a couple of releases to people
who'd found bugs in rc-1.5b2 that were called b3.  To avoid any
possibility of confusion, I have named this beta release rc-1.5b4.

Tim Goodwin 1999-01-11