Developer 2.8.0-pre available for ftp

[Alan Bleasby]

Dear developers,

A pre-release of EMBOSS-2.8.0 is available for, primarily, GUI developers
at:

  ftp://ftp.uk.embnet.org/pub/EMBOSS/pre/EMBOSS-2.8.0-pre.tar.gz

This is not the final 2.8.0, in-house additions, additions of
contributions, fixes (etc) are still in progress. The file has not been
QA-tested as thoroughly as a main release. EMBASSY packages have not
yet been configured for the final release.

Nevertheless it will allow GUI developers to bring their parsers
up to date before the main release, which we expect to happen in
a couple of weeks if all goes well.


As ever, check the ChangeLog file. I recommend that you use the
default system compiler on systems where gcc is also installed.
That is done by (e.g.) setenv CC cc   before using the configure
script. Doing so will ensure full optimisation for your platform.
Systems which use gcc as the compiler are, of course, catered for.

For SGI systems there is a new compilation flag --with-sgiabi=
which can take the values   n32m3, n32m4, 64m3 and 64m4   and
their meanings should hopefully be clear.

Compilation on all systems now has large file support switched on by
default (although the current indexing system is still limited to
2Gb source files.. this will be replaced, we hope, in 2.9.0).

If you need 64-bit pointers on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris (and the hardware
supports them) you can use the --enable-64 configuration switch. It is
highly unlikely you'll want to use that switch.

If you use a system other than AIX, Linux, SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64
or MacOSX then large file support will probably not be enabled.
In that case please contact me (and it might be a help if you
send me your system stdio.h if you can legally do so).

Alan