			    Forthcoming Release :
			      Sheffield-NQS v4.0
			      
			 Academic Computing Services
			   University of Sheffield
			   
			       Stuart Herbert
			 (S.Herbert@Sheffield.ac.uk)


	This document contains information about the next major release of
	this software, to be known as Sheffield-NQS v4.0.
	
	
----------------------------
	Information
----------------------------

	--------------------
	The Current Situation : Monsanto-NQS v3.36

	----------
	Purpose Of Our Work
	
	The University of Sheffield, funded by the Joint Information
	Services Committee (JISC) to supply and support batch processing
	systems to UK Higher Educational establishments, currently provides
	support for Monsanto-NQS, by John Roman.
	
	This support is in the form of bug-fix releases, mainly, although we
	are happy to accept, and integrate in, modifications which introduce
	new functionality.
	
	----------
	New Developments
	
	We are currently NOT developing new functionality ourselves, until
	after the release of Sheffield-NQS v4.0.  We have produced a list of
	modifications suggested by UK Higher Educational establishments,
	which is constantly updated and sorted by priority.
	
	Users outside UK academia are also encouraged to contact me and
	indicate what changes they would like to see made.
	
	--------------------
	Sheffield-NQS

	----------
	Why?
	
	We are currently working on building a new, highly-modularised
	source code tree, based on the existing Monsanto-NQS v3.36 source
	code.  This new source tree will be called Sheffield NQS, and the
	first release version will be 4.0.
	
	We are aiming to
	
	o  greatly improve portability, by following international standards
	   such as POSIX.1, and by introducing automatic, compile-time
	   configuration where appropriate.
	
	o  improve internal structure, to greatly simplify the future
	   addition of new features, and ease maintenance.
	   
	o  simplify configuration and installation, through the use of an
	   interactive configuration system.
	   
	The number of new features in v4.0 will be very small (the following
	have already been implemented) :
	
	o  runtime-switchable support for different spoken languages
	   (English/British will be provided by us).  This support is
	   currently limited to languages which can be supported in 8-bit
	   ASCII.
	   
	o  extended error-handling and runtime debugging features for
	   completeness.
	   
	----------
	When?
	
	Release dates are notorious for being hopelessly wrong, so take this
	one with a pinch of salt.
	
	We are aiming to release v4.0 of Sheffield-NQS no later than the end
	of March, 1995 - at all costs, it must be out by the end of April,
	1995.
	
	Pre-releases will be available on a regular basis from no later than
	the end of February, 1995.  Pre-releases may be available earlier if
	progress is better than expected.
	
	----------
	After v4.0
	
	Once Sheffield-NQS v4.0 has been released, we will be turning our
	attention to the wish-list, and doing all we can to empty that list.
	
	At this time, I personally expect that we will release Sheffield-NQS
	v5.0 once the supported functionality has stabilised.
	
	----------
	`Interests' Directory

	From v4.0 onwards, we are encouraging all users with a commercial
	interest in all NQS-related products to provide a short entry for
	our `Interests' Directory, which will be distributed with
	Sheffield-NQS.
	
	> Company        :
	> How To Contact :
	>                :
	> Submitted By   :
	>
	> Product Name   :
	> Product Desc   :
	>                :
	>                :
	>                :
	>                :

	For each relevant product supplied by a company, please supply no
	more than ten lines of description.

	Updates to the `Interests' Directory will go out with all patches,
	bug-fixes, or new releases of Sheffield-NQS, and a complete copy of
	the latest version will be available via ftp from our NQS Archive.
	
	If you want an entry in time for v4.0, mail me.
