From: nickel@cs.tu-berlin.de (Juergen Nickelsen)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: ShapeTools on Gatekeeper, and 1.4 (was Re: Where can I ftp ShapeTools from?)
Date: 28 Jan 1993 14:55:11 GMT
Organization: STONE Project, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Reply-To: shape@cs.tu-berlin.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: tempest.cs.tu-berlin.de
In-reply-to: dominick@protocol.zycad.com's message of 26 Jan 1993 18:16:10 -0500

In article <1k4gnqINNh61@hayaku.protocol.zycad.com>
dominick@protocol.zycad.com (Dom Paniscotti) writes:

> In article <1993Jan26.215145.1039@delfin.com>, mr@delfin.com (Mark Rosenberg) writes:

> |> I've tried to pull the ShapeTools source from the sites specified in the FAQ,
> |> but have met with no success. gatekeeper.dec.com no longer appears to have it
> |> and I was not able to create an anonymous ftp connection to
> |> coma.cs.tu-berlin.de. Are there any other sites that I can try? Thanks.
[...]
> 
> 
> It's on gatekeeper, but not where it was advertised to be. Try the directory
> /.9/plan/shape.

On gatekeeper.dec.com there are the following files in /pub/plan:

-r--r--r--  1 root     system     542284 Feb 16  1990 shape1.1.tar.Z
-r--r--r--  1 root     system     881599 Jun  2  1992 shapeTools-1.3-tar.Z
-r--r--r--  1 root     system     204075 May 28  1992 shapeTools-1.3-tutor.ps.Z
-r--r--r--  1 root     system     889047 Apr 26  1992 shapeTools-1.3pre19.tar.Z

shape1.1.tar.Z is *way* out of date. Not recommended.

I don't know why they still keep shapeTools-1.3pre19.tar.Z. It is a
prerelease to shapeTools-1.3-tar.Z and just contains more bugs.
(Perhaps this is the cause that it's bigger. :-)

shapeTools-1.3-tar.Z is the up to date version.

Be aware that we are preparing shapeTools 1.4 now and hope to get it
out in April. I'll enclose below what Axel Mahler wrote as a preview.

===============================================================================
ShapeTools-1.4 preview:

Andy Wick asks:
   I haven't heard anything from the SHAPE-L mailing list in over a month.
   At one point our site would receive mail sent over a month late, from
   the list.  Is the list still up and running?  Is shapetools still
   being supported/ is there a new version available with bug fixes?

Yes, the list is still here and alive. It's been rather quiet for some
time, though. For some reason, most people who should post their
comments and observations to the list, tend to mail them to us
privately instead.

There has been quite a number of bug fixes and major improvements since
shapeTools-1.3 was released. As you might already guess, we haven't 
had enough time to produce an intermediate release yet. This is mostly
due to a complex restructuring of the software (our aim is to make it 
much better maintainable).

Our current schedule has the release of ShapeTools-1.4 set for the
first week in April. This time, we'll publish prereleases though.

Here's a little preview of things to come with ShapeTools-1.4:

  - major restructuring of the entire library system. This results
    in a much cleaner general system structure, and a more orthogonal
    set of concepts.

  - shape's version binding has been factored out into the toolkit
    library. This allows uniform rule-based version identification on all
    levels of the system (e.g. "retrv foofile.c[most_recently_published:]"
    will bind the version that is selected by rule "most_recently..."
    to the name "foofile.c" and retrieve it).

  - two - completely documented - toolkit libraries (along with the 
    atfs base library) instead of one undocumented toolkit lib.

  - an extension language interface has been added to ShapeTools,
    providing a VERY powerful and flexible alternative to writing
    shell-scripts around the ShapeTools commands, or writing C programs
    on top of AtFS. The extension language is John Ousterhout's TCL.

  - new parser for Shapefiles. The (er..) syntax of Shapefiles has
    been slightly straightened (no need for the "#% RULE-SECTION / 
    #% END-RULE-SECTION" junk anymore). With the new parser and the
    new version binding in place, shape is now twice as fast as before
    (or only half as slow =;-).

  - more powerful macro substitution schemes (e.g. string substitution).

  - much better derived object cache handling. This used to be a
    troublesome area that needed attention for a long time. Cooperative
    builds now work *much* better.

  - better support for history management, in order to enable certain
    popular change control paradigms such as copy-modify-merge.

  - New, less cryptic, and less ressource wasting version archive 
    organization (important for people with Sys-V filesystems).

  - More flexible and straightforward version selection rules,
    providing user customization of global rules, rule evaluation 
    hierarchies, formulation of constraints with respect to other 
    objects, and more.

  - A new GNU-Emacs mode (AtFS-mode) providing nearly seamless
    integration of ShapeTools configuration management with
    everybody's favorite editor. This includes automatic retrieval of
    versions, a simple and reliable checkout procedure, full explicit
    access to individual versions as well as baselined configurations
    with emacs' "find-file" command. There is also an integration with
    the GNU-project's debugger, gdb. All this adds (almost) up to an
    integrated project support environment - you'll just love it.

  - An experimental graphical (Motif-style) user interface to the toolkit, 
    based on Tk, an X-11 extension to TCL.

  - Last but not least an improved tutorial. 

I hope all this will encourage you to maintain your interest in
ShapeTools.  We'll do our best to make ShapeTools-1.4 a quality
release that comes out in time.

So long.

Axel Mahler

===============================================================================


--
Juergen Nickelsen