Newsgroups: bit.listserv.lstsrv-l
Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 00:57:35 +0200
Reply-To:     ERIC@SEARN
From:         Eric Thomas <ERIC@SEARN.BITNET>
Subject:      Beta-test sites wanted for 1.7d

Warning: the reply address points to me, not the list.

I would like to start beta-testing 1.7d either by the middle of this week
(after  the Ebone  meetings)  or  1 week  later,  depending on  resulting
workload. Please apply now if you are interested. I need mostly SP5 sites
and XA/5.5 sites, since I am running ESA 1.1 myself.

The differences are mostly internal  changes which to improve robustness,
functionality  and   performance  while  decreasing  dependence   on  CMS
functions such  as the various  reader file manipulation  commands, XEDIT
sort,  and   so  on.  The   REXX  internals  were   mostly  approximative
implementations of the  syntax they described - for  instance, the QUIET:
keyword seldom worked as expected when the syntax was not a straight list
of userid@node's,  trailing .BITNET's were not  consistently removed, and
so on.  REXX code  seldom displayed error  messages when  system commands
gave an unexpected return code, and  these messages were usually not very
easy to  understand anyway. Things are  better under 1.7d, but  there are
still 25k lines of REXX and  thousands of potential errors that come from
CMS and for which one cannot obtain a meaningful description.

The main performance improvements are for LIST GLOBAL, REVIEW, processing
of  incoming Netdata/DISK  DUMP files,  generation of  BITEARN NODES  and
PEERS NAMES-based  tables, maintenance of  large lists, and  when mailing
files to  Internet users  (in particular  LSVMAIL should  not run  out of
storage any longer - not that  any recent change had made LSVMAIL require
more storage, but for some reason many people think it is preposterous of
me  to  suggest adding  1M  of  storage  when  moving from  CMS5/1.7a  to
CMS8/1.7c and that  the reason I make LISTSERV issue  warnings at startup
when it thinks it hasn't got enough  storage is so I can be notified when
people reboot their servers). LISTSERV  will need more storage when doing
nothing due to the  fact that REXX code which is not in  use sits on disk
while PASCAL  routines are always in  memory, if you are  not prepared to
add 200k if  LISTSERV complains it hasn't got enough,  stay with 1.7c. On
the other hand, many things that required  lots of memory now use up much
less, due to not having to load  things into stems, edit them, then stack
the result and call  a routine which will pull the  stuff back to another
stem and finally stack it again for some other command.

The main  functionality improvements are  new REVIEW options to  sort the
subscribers'  list,  better  error  reporting,  automatic  conversion  of
DISTRIBUTE jobs in Netdata or  other recognized format before delivery to
mail-only recipients, support  of ':oldnode.'/':newnode.' tags, automatic
recognition of local Internet address if  listed in BITEARN NODES but not
in  configuration file  (this seems  trivial but  can avoid  many mailing
loops), 'Reply-To:' field pointing to list owners on most list management
messages  sent to  end users,  QUERY *  for list  owners, and  many small
improvements to the SHOW command.

The main incompatibilities  were already posted to this list  as the code
was being written. There is a last one I didn't mention yet - LSVBESTP is
gone completely. If you have local  programs which called LSVBESTP with 4
or more parameters, you will have problems (the 4th parameter was blindly
INTERPRETed, which the new PASCAL code cannot quite do). If you only call
it with 2 or  3 parameters, you will be able to use  LSVBSP with the same
calling sequence. The name was changed  to make sure all attempts to call
the old routine are caught.

  Eric
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU