Ho ho ho, and about damn time.

[Matthew D. F. <ful...@ov...>]

Merry Christmas to all, or happy holidays, or whatever the politically
correct gunk is.

We've been rather slow on libpostal lately; spare time has become
practically nonexistent.  Still, there's a lot of problems that have been
fixed since the last SNAPshot, and I've managed to crank a lot of time
into it the past few days and get it whipped into shape.

So, there's SNAP4.  It's far from perfect, of course, but it's by far
our best release yet, and it's steadily moving us forward into useful
code.  Want to write a quick program to tally up what the proportions of
various mail clients people are using on mailing lists you're on?  Save
it in a mbox file, and you can use the postal_get_header() function to
quickly grab them out and do some counting.  See the test/listfrom/ test
program for an example of how to do it; that program shows how some of
our newer mbox functions work and fit together.

All the bugs in previous SNAPshots have been squashed, and I'm not
currently aware of any in the new code.  That, of course, doesn't mean
there aren't any, just that I haven't noticed them yet.  There's a lot
of cruft (like POSTAL_MSG_LIST) that's being phased out, but it's totally
gone yet.  And there's a lot of stuff that needs further work.  Hopefully
2002 will afford me more time to work on it than 2001 did.

See the release notes and/or the News blurb on our SourceForge page for
more info.  Share and enjoy.

And the boilerplate:

libpostal isn't developed in a vacuum.  It's not being written just for
the sake of being written, but to be used.  Anonymous CVS access lets
anyone always access the latest changes, but it's far easier to put up
periodic SNAPshots.  We don't just put them up to look good, they're
there to be downloaded and used.  Suggestions, ideas, bug reports, patches,
comments, or whatever other things you want to say about it, are what
this list is about.  We developers don't have access to all the possible
systems out there, so try running the sample programs and let us know
about any problems, so we can make sure libpostal is kept as portable as
possible.  See the TODO and KNOWN_BUGS files in the distribution.

The README, BUILDING, and ROADMAP files in the tarball give specific
information about what's what in the distribution.  Enjoy!   :)



--=20
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)     |    ful...@ov...
Principal Architect, Release Engineer, Master of Code-fu
The Libpostal Project			http://libpostal.sourceforge.net