[Announce] libpostal-SNAP6 release

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

Well, it's that time again.  Fortunately, this time we managed to not go
on hiatus for the better part of 2 years.

libpostal-SNAP6 is now out in the world to fend for itself.  As promised,
this release is primarily architectural in nature, with the following
focuses:

- An error-handling system that allows easy passing of errors up the
  stack, and easy looking-up by user programs of what error happened
  where.  User programs may take note of the postal_errno() function,
  which can be used in a very similar way to the C 'errno' facility.
  When using the pthreads variant of the library, this system can also be
  used safely in a POSIX-threaded program.  See the information in the
  docs on postal_pthread_init() and friends for more information.
- Additional functions have been added to do a lot of the construction
  and destruction of various data structures that I've been doing by hand
  in various places.  Anything to reduce those pesky memory leaks...
- The documentation has been reworked a bit behind the scenes to be a bit
  easier to work with.  Also, a new version of the Codelibrary SGML DTD
  has been released that should be a lot more amenable to use in other
  projects.  Some architectural work has happened here that should make
  it easier down the line to separate out developer and user
  documentation (though that's far from ready to rock).

There's also a new tarball of the formatted documentation, and the docs
on the project website have been updated to -SNAP6.


Looking forward, I'm planning to do a more code reworking for the next
SNAPshot, particularly in the arena of the POP implementation.  I want to
do a bit of recoding on some of the mbox reading code, to make things a
bit more robust, and to add flexibility in how a user program goes about
doing things.  And, overall, I want to add some higher-level functions,
now that we've got the lower-level stuff working pretty well.


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