gawk: public beta for next patch now available

[Aharon Robbins]

This note is to announce the first BETA release of patch 5 to version
3.1 of gawk.

It is available from:

        ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/gawk/gawk-3.1.4l.tar.gz
        ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/gawk/gawk-3.1.4l.tar.bz2

and from:

        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk-3.1.4l.tar.gz
        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk-3.1.4l.tar.bz2

Overall, this release fixes a number of bugs, as well as offering upgrades
to various infrastructure technologies, such as bison, autoconf, and
so on.  Of particular note is that gawk is now fully multibyte aware,
working completely in terms of characters instead of in bytes, for those
fucnctions where it matters.  The list of changes from the NEWS file is
appended, below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.  Other than changing the version and patch levels, this
is what I expect to release as 3.1.5.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you.  Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
address@hidden
---------------------------------------------
Changes from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5
---------------------------

1. The random() suite has been updated to a current FreeBSD version, which
   works on systems with > 32-bit ints.

2. A new option, `--exec' has been added. It's like -f but ends option
   processing.  It also disables `x=y' variable assignments, but not -v.
   It's needed mainly for CGI scripts, so that source code can't be
   passed in as part of the URL.

3. dfa.[ch] have been synced with GNU grep development.  This also fixes
   multiple regex matching problems in multibyte locales.

4. Updated to Automake 1.9.5.

5. Updated to Bison 2.0.

6. The getopt* and regex* files were synchronized with current GLIBC CVS.
   See the ChangeLog for the versions and minor edits made.

7. `configure --disable-nls' now disables just gawk's own translations.
   Gawk continues to work with the locale's numeric formatting.  This
   includes a bug fix in handling the printf ' flag (e.g., %'d).

8. Gawk is now multibyte aware.  This means that index(), length(),
   substr() and match() all work in terms of characters, not bytes.

9. Gawk is now smarter about parsing numeric constants in corner cases.

11. Not closing open redirections no longer causes gawk to exit non-zero.

10. The VMS port has been updated.

11. Changes from Andrew Schorr at the xmlgawk project to provide for
    open hooks from extensions are now included.  This will let the
    xmlgawk extension work in the standard gawk.

12. Updated to gettext 0.14.4. Gawk no longer includes its own copy
    of the gettext `intl' library, following current GNU practice to
    rely on there being an external version thereof.

13. A regexp of the form `//' will now generate a warning that it
    is not a C++ comment from --lint (awk.y).

xx. Various minor bugs fixed. See the ChangeLog for the details.