Upgrade Path for freeWAIS

The next release of freeWAIS will be freeWAIS-0.31.  At the very least,
it will have bug fixes for those inevitable problems that will be found.
It's highly unlikely that all (or even most) of the bugs in the 0.n
releases of freeWAIS will ever be exterminated, so we are taking a
slightly different approach.

In the very near future a release of freeWAIS-0.n will be out that
supports the Search Engine Programming Interface developed for
freeWAIS-1.0.  This will allow the user to interface the Z39.50-1988
protocol stack with any sort of search engine desired.  Since most of
the code problems are in the search engine, this should solve quite a
few problems.  This API has already been tested - we are integrating it
into the 0.2 code as of this date. We have successfully run WAIS servers
with Postgres, GREP and lqtext as the underlying search engines.  The
Search Engine API also allows the user to execute external processes as
the search system.  A "Result Set" structure is defined for the protocol
engine, and any external searching system that can create this "Result
Set" output format may be used.  As mentioned above, we successfully
used GREP and a simple perl script to generate search results in the
proper format. We will not let this new feature delay "bug fix"
releases, however.

freeWAIS-1.0 is coming along, although the going has been very slow.
Many of you have tested against the alpha server we have been running at
CNIDR, and quite a few flaws have been brought to our attention.   We
continue to work at it and will keep you posted.
