GRASS4.1beta now available

[Rob Knauerhase]

		"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only
		 proved it correct, not tried it."
				      -- Donald Knuth

The staff of the Office of GRASS Integration is happy to announce the release
of GRASS4.1beta to the Internet community (proof of correctness of GRASS is
left as an exercise for the reader).  As usual, the source is the CERL FTP
site at moon.cecer.army.mil .

As this is beta software, there are doubtless some minor bugs and problems
that need to be worked out.  We would be happy to hear of any bugs you
encounter, preferably via the "bug.report.sh" script included in the
software.  Beta-testing is not for everyone, though; while we are confident
of the state of the system at this release, we do not recommend replacing
your current 4.0 installation unless you are willing and able to find and
report bugs.  Conversely, those who use and test GRASS4.1 in the beta stage
will help greatly in the bugfixing process, benefitting not only themselves
but the entire GRASS community, and will have advance use of the new
functionality included in GRASS4.1.

The sources are available in /grass/grass4.1beta/source/source*, and are in
the form of a 17-MB cpio archive split into 1MB chunks for ease of
acquisition.  Related sources (interfaces from GRASS to other software
systems) are in /grass/grass4.1beta/related/*.  The spearfish database and
other data are also available, or you can use data from previous GRASS
installations at your site.

Additionally, with this release, we are testing a binary release process.
Because some sites lack expertise or desire to compile the software, and some
operating systems are "unbundling" their C compilers (feel free to call the
vendors and complain! :), we have made available a "ready to run" version of
the GRASS4.1beta release for Sun Sparc (sun4) architectures.  This package
includes the programs in src and src.alpha (which for 4.1beta includes
xgrass).  The binary release is linked against static libraries, so the
resultant programs should work with any version of SunOS4.x .  However, they
are also much larger than they would be if you compiled them yourself.

The binary release is available in /grass/grass4.1beta/binary/*, and consists
of 61 1-megabyte chunks of a tar archive.  PLEASE NOTE that OGI at this time
is only testing the binary release process; while we will be glad to hear
suggestions about the binary release, we do not have the manpower to provide
more than superficial support for the binary distribution.  It is anticipated
that the expertise in the GRASS user community, through the GRASS mailing
lists and newsgroups, will make itself available to solve many of the
problems users may encounter with the binary release.  Any bugs in the GRASS
software itself should be reported via "bug.report.sh" as usual.

If there are any questions, please let me know.  Questions and problems with
the ftp-site should be directed to grass-ftp-admin at moon.cecer.army.mil .

Rob
--
Rob Knauerhase [rob at amber.cecer.army.mil]  Office of GRASS Integration
Construction Engineering Research Labs, US Army Corps of Engineers
"See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the
 money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what they do with it.
 Bake it into pies, probably.  Anything to avoid creating jobs." -- Dave Barry