Tue Jan 30 16:29:51 CST 2001
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are interim SHORE snapshots.  Their purpose is to provide
"releases" to SHORE users faster than the normal release process
works.  A new major release of SHORE is not intended for sometime.
However the "interim shapshots" provided here are solid, working
systems that have support for various newer compilers and operating
systems.  They also may have performance improvments and bugfixes
beyond those in the most recent formal release.

Unfortunately, the documentation in the shore release notes and in
some portions of the doc tree in the snapshots, are hopelessly out
of date.  The "paradise shore" release documentation was obsolete
by several months when it was written.  A lot of work has gone into
SHORE that didn't make it into the release, or that the release missed
by only a month or so.

Note that the shore build process is a two phase process.  The
"bootstrap" build will generate a set of Makefiles from the Imakefiles
in the source tree.  After the initial build is done, it is no longer
necessary to present all the various options to make.  They are just
used on the preliminary build to configure the build environment itself.

To perform a new bootstrap build it is necessary to remove the top-level
generated Makefile, and the auto-configured config/shore.def that the
build process has built.   If you are using a custom shore.def you 
may want to move it out of the way, and let the build system configure
one for you before customizing it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some notes about SHORE builds...

Shore tries to be super-conservative about rebuilding things when the
configuration may have changed.  Because of this, it is all too easy
to find everything rebuilding when something is touched in a Makefile.
Oh well.  By default Shore builds dependencies on a per-file basis, so
that changes that force a dependency rebuild  will hopefully cause
less work and time.  You can change that behavior; look in shore.def

There should be a 'README.N' file here, where N is the snapshot number,
that provides information about what has changed since the previous
snapshot.

There is another file to look at, README.BUILD, that gives an overview
of compiling these shore snapshots on a number of platforms.  DO NOT USE
the build directions for previous versions of shore, such as the "2.0"
release.  They DO NOT APPLY to current versions of shore, including
the interim snapshots.   The parts of the 2.0 documentation that will
apply deal with shore.def options and other configuration options,
not the actual build process itself.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
What does "supported" mean?

The Shore READMEs in this directory mention that some architectures and
operating systems combinations are "supported".   What does that mean?
It means that there are resources available from the CS department
to provide support for Shore on those platforms.  It doesn't mean
that Shore won't work on unsupported platforms.  It doesn't mean
that I won't answer questions about Shore on unsupported platforms.
Shore is a complex system in itself and most problems with it are
platform independent.