Release Notes for v3.4.0

Changes introduced in 3.4.2 were mostly to get networking code working in mingw environment. The naming collition of ASSA::ERROR logging mask was resolved by renaming it to ASSA::ASSAERR.

Logging Mask name change

3.4.1	3.4.2
ASSA::ERROR	ASSA::ASSAERR

It was discovered by trial-and-error that you cannot set Socket into blocking mode. Instead, a Socket can either have O_NONBLOCK flag set or cleared. Therefore, Socket::blocking option was removed. Use Socket::turnOptionOn (nonblocking) and Socket::turnOptionOff (nonblocking) respectively to manipulate the flag.

Changes introduced in 3.4.2 were mostly to get networking code working in mingw environment. The naming collition of ASSA::ERROR logging mask was resolved by renaming it to ASSA::ASSAERR.

Logging Mask name change

3.4.1	3.4.2
ASSA::ERROR	ASSA::ASSAERR

It was discovered by trial-and-error that you cannot set Socket into blocking mode. Instead, a Socket can either have O_NONBLOCK flag set or cleared. Therefore, Socket::blocking option was removed. Use Socket::turnOptionOn (nonblocking) and Socket::turnOptionOff (nonblocking) respectively to manipulate the flag.

The interface changes intruduced in version 3.4.0 break backward compatability with the previous versions of the library. This is mostly due to the *feature* of cygwin development tools that fail to differentiate between Assert.h in your build directory and system-wide /usr/include/assert.h file.

The file assa/Assert.h, therefore, has been renamed to assa/Assure.h.

Also, a whole lot of function and data member names has been *normalized* in two classes, GenServer and Singleton in order to improve code readability and consistency. The complete list of changes is listed in the tables below.

In case of stopServer() member function, the event processing loop typical for ver. 3.3.x or prior should be modified in the following fashion:

// ver. 3.3.x and prior

    while (!stopServer()) {
        m_reactor.waitForEvents ();
    }

// ver. 3.4.x

    while (service_is_active ()) {
        m_reactor.waitForEvents ();
    }
	

To accommodate a certain way of initializing applications written with libassa, the way BOOL command-line arguments are parsed and interpreted was changed. In the previous versions, a whole group of options was used as flags. For example, --daemon option was used to tell libassa to deamonize the process. This has been changed to --daemon=BOOL format where BOOL is either "yes" or "no" (any other combinations are invalid and would result in the value being interpreted as "no").

libassa still supports flag options (i.e. --help), but they should be rather an exception then a commonplace practice.

This change is driven by the desire to give an application writer the fullest level of initialization control. The order of initialization is as follows:

1. The command-line arguments are assigned values in the constructor of the class derived from GenServer class.
2. The arguments are later can be overwritten by the INI configuration file using a new function, CmdLineOpts::parse_config_file(IniFile&) introduced by this release.
3. At last, the arguments can be changed by the values given on a command-line.

NOTE: This change has sudden sude-effect. If you forget to adjust the way you pass your old *flag* command-line argument to your program, the value assigned to it would be "no" by default! So, say what you mean with "yes"!

If you use automake tools, modify your configure.in (or configure.ac) accordingly:

dnl -----------------------------
dnl Pick up ASSA library flags.
dnl -----------------------------

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(ASSA, assa-3.4 >= 3.4.0)

AC_SUBST(ASSA_CFLAGS)
AC_SUBST(ASSA_LIBS)