Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1998 11:33:23 +0100 (BST)
From: "Rich N.S. Dawe" <rd5718 AT bristol DOT ac DOT uk>
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: New maintainer for libsocket
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.95q.980429111733.21129A-100000@irix.bris.ac.uk>
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Hello.

	I have recently taken over responsibility for libsocket from
Indrek Mandre. He felt he didn't have enough time to look after the
library. The purpose of this e-mail is to inform the DJGPP community of
this change. Please send any e-mails regarding the library to me. I
currently do not have a Web page for libsocket, but one is planned. I
will send further updates.

	Now, a short description for those who do not know what
libsocket is:

	libsocket is a Berkeley-style sockets library for DJGPP. It
implements TCP/IP networking for DJGPP programs running in a DOS box 
under Windows. It uses Windows's Winsock networking services via the
low-level device driver WSOCK.VXD. Currently it only works with Winsock
1.1, and has only been tested with Windows '95. It will not work under
Windows NT.

	The following features are planned for the next version
(libsocket 0.7):

- Registry access functions allowing the library to obtain the IP
  addresses of DNS servers from the registry. This also allows the
  library to find out the IP address of the computer.

- Error messages when Winsock 2 is detected, rather than crashing.

- More documentation, and more pointers to other sources of information.
  A FAQ will be written.

- A binary distribution and a source distribution, and uploading to the
  DJGPP archive at some point.

- A Windows-based set-up program written with RSXNT/DJ, lccwin-32 or
  Mingw32 (I haven't decided which compiler to use yet).

I hope to have the a work-in-progress (WIP) release within the next 
couple of weeks. I hope to incorporate Winsock 2 support in a later
release. If you have any features you'd like incorporated, any
suggestions, patches or bugfixes, please mail me them. Also, please mail
any questions you'd like to see in the FAQ.

	Indrek has said that people have been downloading libsocket
0.6.1 from his home page - please do not. This is an incomplete release,
and shouldn't be used.

	Thank you,

	Rich Dawe

==============================================================================
   Rich Dawe - 3rd year Physicist   |     mailto: rd5718 AT irix DOT bris DOT ac DOT uk
      @ Bristol University, UK      |  Web: http://irix.bris.ac.uk/~rd5718/
==============================================================================