Release of rc-1.6

Release of rc-1.6

[Tim Goodwin]

I am delighted to announce, at long last, a new full release of rc.

I've included the NEWS file from the distribution below.  This is
intended to summarize all the changes since the last full release,
rc-1.4, about 8 years ago.  It is remarkable, and a testament to the
quality of rc-1.4, that so little has changed in the code itself over
that time.

You can obtain rc from here.

    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~tjg/rc/release/rc-1.6.tar.gz

If you don't have gzip handy, remove the `.gz' for an uncompressed
tarball.  If you are unable to use HTTP to obtain rc, please contact me
and we'll figure out some way to get it to you.

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

Tim.


Highlights of changes since rc-1.4.  See ChangeLog for further details.

Portability.  The major change since the last full release is that rc
now uses GNU autoconf and automake.  Other parts of the build process
have been tidied up too, so that building rc should now be painless.  It
has been tested on a wide variety of Unix-like systems.

Bug fixes.  The following bugs have been fixed: the interaction with
readline was not always correct; SIGCLD set to SIG_IGN could cause a
hang; some obscure pipeline incantations could cause a hang; the `wait'
builtin could become uninterruptible; an application could crash rc
by making stdin nonblocking; the `-i' flag didn't work with readline;
$history didn't work properly over NFS; a few memory leaks; and an off
by one bug in reporting line numbers of errors.

New features.  The following features are new: the `-s' flag, which
causes rc to read from stdin even if arguments are present; the `-V'
flag, which prints a version string; $bqstatus which holds the exit
status of the last backquote command; additional options to the `whatis'
builtin; and support for vrl, another lightweight readline-style
library.

What happened to rc-1.5?  A number of beta releases were made with names
like rc-1.5b2, which might suggest improvements over rc-1.5.  To avoid
any possibility of confusion, I decided to name this release rc-1.6
instead.

Tim Goodwin
1999-05-26