Upgrade Path for freeWAIS

The next release of freeWAIS will be freeWAIS-0.21.  At the very least,
it will have bug fixes for those inevitable problems that will be found.
It's highly unlikely that all (or even most) of the bugs in the 0.n
releases of freeWAIS will ever be exterminated, so we are taking a
slightly different approach.

In the very near future (hopefully, by the end of October, 1993) a
release of freeWAIS-0.n will be out that supports the Search Engine
Programming Interface developed for freeWAIS-1.0.  This will allow the
user to interface the Z39.50-1988 protocol stack with any sort of search engine
desired.  Since most of the code problems are in the search engine, this
should solve quite a few problems.  This API has already been tested - we
are integrating it into the 0.2 code as of this date.  We have
successfully run WAIS servers with Postgres, GREP and lqtext as the
underlying search engines.  The Search Engine API also allows the user to
execute external processes as the search system.  A "Result Set"
structure is defined for the protocol engine, and any external searching
system that can create this "Result Set" output format may be used.  As 
mentioned above, we successfully used GREP and a simple perl script to generate
search results in the proper format. We will not let this new feature delay 
"bug fix" releases, however.

freeWAIS-1.0 is coming along, although the going has been very slow.
Many of you have tested against the alpha server we have been running at
CNIDR, and quite a few flaws have been brought to our attention.   We
continue to work at it and will keep you posted.


