Forthcoming Release : Sheffield-NQS v4.0
Academic Computing Services , University of Sheffield
Stuart Herbert (S.Herbert@Sheffield.ac.uk)Document copyright ©. All rights reserved.
Abstract
This document contains information about the next major release of
this software, to be known as Sheffield-NQS v4.0.
Contents
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Information
The Current Situation : Monsanto-NQS v3.36
Purpose Of Our Work
The University of Sheffield, funded by the Joint Information
Services Committee (JISC) to supply and support batch processing
systems to UK Higher Educational establishments, currently provides
support for Monsanto-NQS, by John Roman.
This support is in the form of bug-fix releases, mainly, although we
are happy to accept, and integrate in, modifications which introduce
new functionality.
New Developments
We are currently NOT developing new functionality ourselves, until
after the release of Sheffield-NQS v4.0. We have produced a list of
modifications suggested by UK Higher Educational establishments,
which is constantly updated and sorted by priority.
Users outside UK academia are also encouraged to contact me and
indicate what changes they would like to see made.
Sheffield-NQS
Why?
We are currently working on building a new, highly-modularised
source code tree, based on the existing Monsanto-NQS v3.36 source
code. This new source tree will be called Sheffield NQS, and the
first release version will be 4.0.
We are aiming to
- greatly improve portability, by following international standards
such as POSIX.1, and by introducing automatic, compile-time
configuration where appropriate.
- improve internal structure, to greatly simplify the future
addition of new features, and ease maintenance.
- simplify configuration and installation, through the use of an
interactive configuration system.
The number of new features in v4.0 will be very small (the following
have already been implemented) :
- runtime-switchable support for different spoken languages
(English/British will be provided by us). This support is
currently limited to languages which can be supported in 8-bit
ASCII.
- extended error-handling and runtime debugging features for
completeness.
When?
Release dates are notorious for being hopelessly wrong, so take this
one with a pinch of salt.
We are aiming to release v4.0 of Sheffield-NQS no later than the end
of March, 1995 - at all costs, it must be out by the end of April,
1995.
Pre-releases will be available on a regular basis from no later than
the end of February, 1995. Pre-releases may be available earlier if
progress is better than expected.
After v4.0
Once Sheffield-NQS v4.0 has been released, we will be turning our
attention to the wish-list, and doing all we can to empty that list.
At this time, I personally expect that we will release Sheffield-NQS
v5.0 once the supported functionality has stabilised.
`Interests' Directory
From v4.0 onwards, we are encouraging all users with a commercial
interest in all NQS-related products to provide a short entry for
our `Interests' Directory, which will be distributed with
Sheffield-NQS.
> Company :
> How To Contact :
> :
> Submitted By :
>
> Product Name :
> Product Desc :
> :
> :
> :
> :
For each relevant product supplied by a company, please supply no
more than ten lines of description.
Updates to the `Interests' Directory will go out with all patches,
bug-fixes, or new releases of Sheffield-NQS, and a complete copy of
the latest version will be available via ftp from our NQS Archive.
If you want an entry in time for v4.0, mail me.
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