[Announce] libpostal-SNAP5 release

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

Well, it's been a long time since -SNAP4.  I've been busy enough with
other things that I just haven't had much steam lately to work on
libpostal.  I'm hoping to be able to do more on it in the near future,
but I've said that every SNAP so far, so that's not much of a track
record.

It's been a year and a half since -SNAP4 now, and while -SNAP5 isn't a
year and a half ahead of it, we have still made significant progress
toward having a fully workable mail library.  Some highlights of the
changes since -SNAP4:

- Lots of robustness and performance fixes in the mbox code.
- POSTAL_MSG_LIST has been consigned to the dustbowl of history.
- New functions for manipulation of mail headers.
- A number of portability fixes in the code.
- Lots of memory leaks (some really bad) have been plugged, and
  infrastructure has been added to allow the library and the sample/test
  programs to be built with dmalloc <http://dmalloc.com/> for tracking
  down any future such problems.
- We can build a profiled version of the library for performance work.
- Lots of updates in the Make infrastructure make the portability better,
  and a bit more fail-safe.
- And, finally, we now have a reasonably complete implementation of
  Maildir functionality.

Plus, the usual round of bugfixes, performance and robustness
improvements, code and documentation cleanup, yada yada.

There's also a new tarball of the formatted documentation, and the docs
on the project website have been updated to -SNAP5.


Looking forward, I'm planning to do a lot of infrastructure work for the
next SNAP, especially in the areas of error-handling and -checking and
memory management.  See the TODO file in the source distribution for some
thoughts and information on that.  The TODO has been a bit reorganized to
be more explicit and useful.


And the boilerplate:

libpostal is released under a BSD-style license, to give each user as
much freedom as possible in choosing how they use the software. Share and
enjoy.

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.
         =20
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