Developer Forum

i all,

Once again, thanks to the efforts of many developers, testers, and
users, we are pleased to announce the latest ACE+TAO+CIAO+DAnCE x.8.3
release, which is available from the usual download location at:

http://download.dre.vanderbilt.edu/

under the heading "Latest Micro Release Kit."

The doxygen documentation for this release is also available. In
addition to the packages combined of sources and generate makefiles,
this release provides source-only packages for developers who use MPC to
generate their own makefiles.

We encourage you to download the new release, use it with your
applications, and let us know if you encounter any problems. Please use the:

$ACE_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM
$TAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM
$CIAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM
$DAnCE_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM

so that we have the proper version/platform/compiler/options you're
using to report problems. We also request that you take a look at:

$TAO_ROOT/docs/releasenotes/

for the status of various ongoing projects at the DOC group of
Vanderbilt to move ACE+TAO+CIAO+DAnCE forward. Overviews of our recent
progress and upcoming plans are available at:

$ACE_ROOT/NEWS
$TAO_ROOT/NEWS
$CIAO_ROOT/NEWS
$DAnCE_ROOT/NEWS

The overall success rates for the test results gathered from all our
daily builds is 96% for the ACE tests and 96% for the TAO+CIAO+DAnCE
tests. Please see:

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/scoreboard/
http://scoreboard.theaceorb.nl/

for a summary of these tests. As always, we appreciate your help in
resolving any remaining problems. Please see:

$ACE_ROOT/docs/ACE-bug-process.html

for an overview of our bug fixing policies. Moreover, please see

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/support.html

for information commercial support services available from various
companies.

The following is a list of key changes since the last micro release.
Please refer to the corresponding ChangeLog files, NEWS files or
Bugzilla entries for more details on the problem and the nature of fixes
applied.

==============
Changes to ACE
==============

. Two new methods were added to ACE_Pipe: close_read() and
close_write(). These methods can be used to close individual pipe handles.

. The ACE::handle_ready() family of methods was changed to prefer using
poll() over select() on platforms where poll() is available. This
preference was previously only used if ACE_HAS_LIMITED_SELECT was set.
The ACE_HAS_LIMITED_SELECT choice is removed, making ACE_HAS_POLL the
setting that switches this preference. The driving reason for this is
that if select() is called to detect changes on a handle whose values
falls outside that which can safely be stored in an fdset, the
handle-setting macros/functions will set/clear bits outside of the
fdset. This results in very weird memory changes, often in the stack,
which are very hard to diagnose. poll()'s operation does not suffer from
this affect. With the growing use of large numbers of handles and use of
ACE_Dev_Poll_Reactor on Linux, the rate at which this problem was
cropping up was increasing.

. Added a simple helper ACE::is_equal() which compares equality of two
objects without using operator==. This is useful for comparing floating
point values.

. Removed all deprecated methods, arguments, files, classes, macros and
anything else we kept for years.

. Removed Irix/Tru64/SCO/Uniware/Cray support.

. ACE_Pair has been removed. Users should now use std: