announcing swarm-960229 and swarmdocs-960229

[Nelson Minar]

A new version of Swarm is available, swarm-960229, as well as updated
documentation. As always, you will find the code, as well as a list of
changes, on the Swarm release web page:
  http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/release/
You will need authorization to read these pages:
  username swarm-beta
  password AlanTuring
Please do not give this password out to other people: for the current
beta test period, we want to control the set of people who use Swarm.

Here's a text copy of the changes

Changes between swarm-960218 and swarm-960229

swarm-960229 is a minor ugprade, providing (almost) no changes in the way
Swarm code runs. Some small changes were made to the probe user interface,
but other than that everything should run the same.

It represents a major change, though, in the way that the Swarm distribution
is packaged. Applications are no longer distributed as part of the main
Swarm tar file - individual apps are now distributed separately.
Applications are intended to be installed in a sibling directory to the main
Swarm sources, with SWARMHOME=../swarm. In the Swarm library sources, the
artificial support vs. swarmlibs distinction has been removed in favour of a
uniform src directory.

Application authors should notice few changes. There is one important
difference, though, to facilitate modularity of Swarm libraries: the default
set of libraries linked has now changed. Application makefiles need to have
a new line, APPLIBS=, before Makefile.appl is included. All the required
libraries are still linked in, but optional libraries (currently: ga, neuro,
and space) are not linked by default. Add APPLIBS=-lspace, for instance, if
you are using the space library.

In addition, the Makefiles have been overhauled to improve the make process.
Library makes are now more intelligent about installing header files that
have changed (useful if you're developing a library), and application makes
are more intelligent about checking dependency against the Swarm libraries
they link with.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Minar <address@hidden>
Last modified: Fri Mar 1 00:58:54 MST 1996