The next release, to be known as the Cleanup Release, is still in alpha
testing.  As a great deal of rewriting, speed enhancements, and new
features have been added, the alpha cycle has been quite long.  Patience
is still called for, however.

The major changes, as announced by Geoff and Henry at the Winter USENIX
News BOF, are as follows:

 -- There will be no patches from earlier releases; the source tree
    changes too much.

 -- NOV will be integrated.  (It seems that NOV is quickly becoming the
    accepted standard in popular reader and transport implementations).

 -- Expiration has been speeded up.

 -- Most of the build process has been moved into the Makefiles.  The
    doit.* scripts are obsolete.

 -- The "what kind of Unix"(TM somebody) question is gone, replaced by
    better questions about what routines are available.

 -- The newgroup and rmgroup auto-handlers are better; they allow
    permissions to be controlled by person X group.  (Note that as
    my notes recall, Henry claims these are designed more to protect
    against accidents, than any attempt at authentication).

 -- delgroup now removes the spool directory as well -- but only
    *after* the articles expire.

 -- All trouble reporting goes through one shell file, for easier
    customization.

 -- C News will install out-of-the-box on BSD/386 release 1.1.

 -- Newsrun and the locking schemes are more sophisticated.

 -- gzip support for batch compression is included.

 -- contrib/ contains a transport-only NNTP implementation (*not* the
    "reference" implementation).  This is designed to be useful for
    transport, but not reading and posting, news.

 -- Timezone handling changes.  Signed numeric timezones and military
    timezones will be accepted; some *currently* accepted dates which
    aren't RFC-compliant will no longer be accepted.

 -- batchparms can include parameters to compress.

 -- The middle field of the history file gets a third subfield: the size
    of the article.

 -- The documentation will lag behind, as usual, unless volunteer(s)
    step up to the plate.

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