Hercules 2.15 announcement

Jay Maynard

Dec 20, 2001

Hercules 2.15 is now available. This is a major new release, with literally
hundreds of enhancements and fixes:

What's new in release 2.15
Release date: 04 December 2001
Autoconf added to ease portability (Matt Zimmerman, Fritz Elfert,
Willem Konynenberg)
Numerous instruction fixes (Paul Leisy)
TUN/TAP support for Linux kernels beyond 2.4.6 (Matt Zimmerman)
Timer fixes (Greg Smith)
Synchronous I/O (Greg Smith)
Support for IPL from CD-ROMs as with HMC (Jan Jaeger)
CTC hang at shutdown fixed (Jan Jaeger)
CTC TCP/IP now works with VM/ESA (Kris Van Hees)
Compressed CKD endianness and RAS fixes (Greg Smith)
Hot reader support (David "Fish" Trout)
Machine checks now reported for host exceptions, loops, and wait
states (Jan Jaeger)

Linux RPMs and the source tarball are available at
http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules, as usual. This site may be intermittently
unavailable due to my moving this weekend; I'll attempt to re-point the
domain at a mirror site obtained with Sam Knutson's help, but this may or
may not work reliably, as I've had trouble getting DNS straightened out.
I'll upload the files to the Yahoo! Groups hercules-390 file area, as well.
The Windows version will be available in the next couple of days, for folks
who can't build it from source themselves.

Why 2.15? What happened to 2.14? Glad you asked.

Hercules' version numbering scheme was the subject of some discussion at a
gathering of developers recently. After much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and
breaking chairs over people's heads, the following scheme was agreed upon:

Major releases will be numbered n.nn. (n=digit, c=letter.)

Maintenance releases will be generated whenever a fix for a significant
problem is produced. These will be numbered n.nn.n, with the first part of
the number being the major release on which it is based. For example, the
first maintenance release for 2.15, if there is one, will be 2.15.1.

Development snapshots will be numbered n.nn.c.n, again with the first part
of the number being the major release on which it is based. The first
development snapshot based on 2.15 will be 2.15.a.0. Minor changes will
increment the last number; more major changes, like rewriting a module, will
increment the letter and reset the last number, for example from 2.15.a.4 to
2.15.b.0.

It is important to note that there is *NO* correlation between development
releases and maintenance releases. There is no such thing as an upgrade from
2.15.c.3 to 2.15.1; they're separate code streams. Only significant fixes
will be made into maintenance releases, and then by backporting the fix
involved to the major release code. If a fix cannot be backported, it will
not be available until the next major release (which, hopefully, will be put
out quickly, if the bug is bad enough).

Because of all this, there would be confusion if a major release was
numbered 2.14, since the current development code is named 2.14a. We decided
to give everyone a Christmas present: two releases for the price of one!
Future release numbers will follow the definitions above.

I recommend you all grab 2.15 as soon as possible. It really is a
significant advance over 2.13.

10:11 pm