Upgrade Path for freeWAIS

Future releases of freeWAIS will consist primarily of bug fixes
contributed from users and ports to additional platforms.  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 released which
supports the Search Engine Programming Interface developed for ZDist.
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.

ZDist 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.
