Announcing libwww-perl 0.12

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Mon, 11 Jul 1994 01:28:00 -0700


Version 0.12 of libwww-perl is now available.

libwww-perl is a library of Perl4 packages which provides a simple
and consistent programming interface to the World-Wide Web. This
library is being developed as a collaborative effort to assist the
further development of useful WWW clients and tools.

The distribution site and much more information about the libraries
can be found at

<http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/libwww-perl/>

and also at

<ftp://liege.ics.uci.edu/pub/arcadia/libwww-perl/>

I am looking for more contributions to support the many protocols
and also to provide better HTML libraries.

A mailing list has been established for technical discussion about
libwww-perl, including problem reports, interim fixes, suggestions
for features, and contributions. The mailing list address is

libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu

and administrivia (including subscribe requests) should be sent to

libwww-perl-request@ics.uci.edu

Changes from version 0.11:

Placed everything under RCS version control and included repository.
Added www'stat (from Brooks Cutter) for doing stat-like calls on a URL.
Added message field to wwwerror'onrequest so that error-specific
messages (e.g. $@ and $!) can be included in the canned HTML output.
Added symbolic names for all response code numbers.
Reassigned 000 Timed Out error to response code 603.
Added 602 Connection Failed response code.
Vastly improved the error-handling for wwwhttp'request().
Now escapes the URL entries generated by wwwfile'dirlist().
Removed buggy attempt to delete comments at start of wwwhtml'extract_links.
Updated META parsing in wwwhtml to reflect HTML 2.0 proposed spec.
Moved require of sys/socket.ph outside of wwwhttp package declaration
due to a bug in perl4 found by Martijn Koster.
Added many checks to be sure environment variables are defined before
trying to use them in wwwmime, wwwurl, get, and testdates (Martijn Koster).
Fixed bug that occurred when parsing URLs with an empty path.
Replaced complicated wwwurl'unescape loop with a simple substitute
(from Steven E. Brenner via Brooks Cutter).
Added wwwurl'escape() to %hex escape URL segments (from Brooks Cutter).
Added testescapes program for testing wwwurl'escape and unescape.

Have fun,

....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
(fielding@ics.uci.edu)
<A HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding">About Roy</A>