CHANGES TO REMIND * Version 3.0 Patch 18 + MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added TAG and DURATION clauses for communicating more information to back-ends and eventually converting REMIND into a full-fledged scheduler. - Completely reworked the PS/PSFILE mechanism to use the more general SPECIAL mechanism for customizing output in REMIND back-ends. * Version 3.0 Patch 17 + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Made REMIND accept date specs like "Jan 6, 1998" -- the comma is ignored. This was suggested by John Conover . You can even do "REM 27, Aug, 1998, msg bar". (But I don't know why you'd want to.) - Added www/rem2html, a Perl script which converts the output of `remind -p ...' to an HTML table. The script was contributed by Don Schwarz - New security features: Because of the risks of statically-allocated buffers, REMIND now refuses to run if it is installed set-uid or set-gid. If REMIND is run as root, it refuses to read files not owned by root. It also won't open group- or world-writable files, no matter who is running it. Finally, if you read a file you don't own, REMIND disables RUN and shell(). REMIND doesn't do these security checks on stdin, though, so be careful if you run it as root in a script. NOTE: REMIND doesn't do the world- and group-writable checks on devices, FIFOs, etc. Otherwise "remind /dev/null" fails... + BUG FIXES - Increased sizes of some statically-allocated buffers. This doesn't really fix the problem, but makes it more manageable. - Using the "-u" option now implies the "-r" option. This is a security feature. - Added romanian.h to the manifest. Sorry. - CalcMinsFromUTC was failing if time_t was unsigned. I now use difftime(), but not all systems have it. Also, defs.rem was rearranged so PostScript stuff works better, and new target "emxomf" was added to makefile.os2 which uses OMF linking and a dynamically-linked C library. All three of these fixes are courtesy of Christopher J. Madsen . Thanks, Christopher. * Version 3.0 Patch 16 + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Bundled scripts for making a nice WWW calendar server. See the "www" subdirectory in the release. - Added support for the Romanian language, courtesy of Liviu Daia. - Changed sunrise() and sunset() as follows: If the sun never rises, sunrise() returns 1440 and sunset() returns 0. In this case, sunrise()-sunset() returns the length of the dark period of the day, in minutes. If the sun never sets, sunrise() returns 0 and sunset() returns 1440, and sunset()-sunrise() returns the length of the light period of the day, in minutes. Thanks to Michael Salmon for explaining the utility of this. See the file "defs.rem" for the functions _light_len and _dark_len which return the length in minutes of the light and dark period of the day, respectively. + BUG FIXES - If you used the "-g" option, then no background reminders were ever issued. DOH! Thanks to Greg Badros for pointing this out. - Fixed a problem under Solaris 2.5 whereby rem2ps was skipping some latin1 characters which it interpreted as white space. * Version 3.0 Patch 15 + IMPORTANT NOTES - The tar file now unpacks into a Remind subdirectory rather than into the current working directory. - I no longer support Remind under DOS. I don't think I've done anything to stop it from working under DOS, but will no longer compile and test it under DOS, and can't help you if you get stuck. Sorry -- I no longer have a DOS machine. + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Changed psshade() to accept 1 or 3 arguments for colored shading in PostScript calendar mode. - Added a Print dialog to tkremind. - Added support for Brazilian Portuguese courtesy of Marco Paganini - Added support for Italian courtesy of Valerio Aimale + BUG FIXES - Fixed confusing error in rem2ps help messages. - Fixed bug in TkRemind which caused a crash if the "-m" option was used for a month beginning on Sunday. Doh!!! * Version 3.0 Patch 14 + CHANGE IN COPYING POLICY - Remind is now distributed under an _AMENDED_ version of the Gnu General Public License. These amendments are listed in the file COPYRIGHT. The amendments were made for personal reasons; please don't ask me to explain them. They probably don't affect you, anyway. + MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added an X-Windows front-end to Remind. To use it, you must be running under X-Windows on UNIX, and have the "wish" tcl/tk interpreter, version 7.4 of tcl and 4.0 of tk. The front-end is called "tkremind". + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added the WARN keyword for precise advance notice. You can now have advance warning 5, 3, 1 and 0 days in advance (for example.) The WARN keyword operates similarly to the SCHED keyword in that it calls a user-defined function to obtain the advance warning sequence. - Added support for QDOS/SMSQ on the Sinclair QL microcomputer, courtesy of Robert H. Klein NOTE THAT I CANNOT TEST NOR SUPPORT THIS VERSION! - Added support for AmigaDOS / SAS/C, courtesy of Martin Hohl . As before, I CANNOT TEST NOR SUPPORT THIS VERSION, but will rely on feedback from others. + BUG FIXES - Removed the "-n" option from Rem2PS. Instead, if you want the PostScript calendar to start on a Monday, supply the "-m" option to Remind. It was repugnant to have two options to two programs to accomplish one thing. - The "hebdate" built-in function worked incorrectly with 5 arguments. The bug was pointed out by Hershel Safer - This would hang up REMIND: REM Mon 31 Feb MSG Foo and this would fail quietly: REM Mon 31 Feb 1996 MSG Foo Both have been fixed and now report bad date specifications. - Remind now compiles without complaint under gcc -ansi -Wall -pedantic (on my Linux system, anyway!) + IMPORTANT NOTE - I had problems building the DOS version with Turbo C. I have access only to ancient versions of Turbo C and Microsoft C. Remind built fine with Microsoft C, but the TC version hung up. I am not too interested in maintaining the DOS version, so when the MSC compiler no longer works, I will drop DOS support. Please not that I will _not_ support MS Windows, and in fact do not allow Remind to run under Windows (see COPYRIGHT). * Version 3.0 Patch 13 + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added extra parameters to the "psmoon" built-in function so you can annotate the PostScript moon icons. - Added a command-line "time" argument to Remind for testing Remind scripts with specific system times. Also added the realnow() function which has the same relationship to now() as realtoday() has to today(). (See the man page!) - Modified Rem2PS so it prints progress messages to stderr if '-v' command-line argument is used. - In the top of the 'finnish.h' file, added a note about Mikko Silvonen's file of Finnish holidays. + BUG FIXES - Fixed a bug in rem2ps which sometimes caused incorrect PostScript if the -e and -m options were used. Thanks to Michael Neuhauser for reporting the bug and providing a fix. - Made the '-k' option escape shell characters in the message to make it safer. - Fixed a segmentation violation which resulted if not all PUSH-OMIT-CONTEXTs were balanced by POP-OMIT-CONTEXTs. - Removed the prototype for DestroyValue, which is now a macro. I'm amazed that very few compilers complained about this one! - Updated the copyright notices everywhere. * Version 3.0 Patch 12 + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added support for the Danish language, courtesy of Mogens Lynnerup. - Added support for the Polish language, courtesy of Jerzy Sobczyk. - Made the Makefile more portable, thanks to Jim Budler. - Removed some compiler warnings under Linux, thanks to Francois Pinard. - Tidied the man page a bit; added a small bibliography. + BUG FIXES - Fixed a problem with the '-k' option which resulted in a newline being placed after the message text. This was giving sh(1) heartburn... * Version 3.0 Patch 11 + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added release notes to README.UNIX and README.OS2 describing one way to make pop-up alarms under X-Windows and Presentation Manager. - Added the $DefaultPrio system variable - Improved OS/2 support, thanks to Darrel Hankerson, Russ Herman and Norman Walsh. - Made the pushing and popping of operators and operands during expression evaluation in-line code instead of function calls. Did the same for DestroyValue. I'm not sure if this was a good idea -- on the Sparc using gcc, this slowed things down... go figure. + BUG FIXES - Fixed a potential memory leak in the char() function. - Made the TRIGGER() built-in function return its answer in English even for the foreign-language versions -- this was required for compilers which are not 8-bit clean, and for languages with accented letters. - Made expression evaluation slightly faster by eliminating some unnecessary copying of string values. - Corrected some non-portable definitions of the macro UPPER(c) - Fixed typos in french.h * Version 3.0 Patch 10 + MAJOR ENHANCEMENT - OS/2 support is now much better, thanks to Russ Herman. The Borland C compiler under OS/2 and MS-DOS is supported. + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added the SCHED keyword for precise control of scheduling of timed reminders -- it's really quite nifty! - Modified the trigger() function to take up to three arguments -- in addition to a date, you can specify a time and a flag specifying that the trigger should be converted from UTC to local time. - Added $SortByDate, $SortByTime and $SortByPrio system variables. - Added test suites for MS-DOS and OS/2, courtesy of Russ Herman. - In PostScript output, the month and year are output in the %%Page: comments. Makes it nicer to view multi-month calendars with previewers (eg, GhostView.) - Added the PRIORITY keyword for more control of sort order of reminders. Based on a suggestion by George M. Sipe. - Added the msgprefix() and msgsuffix() evaluations around MSG-type reminders for doing fancy things with reminders of different priorities. Also added calprefix() and calsuffix() for doing the same thing in calendar mode. - Enabled the -g option during calendar mode as well as regular mode. + BUG FIXES - Fixed minor bugs in the LocalToUTC and UTCToLocal functions. - "remind -c -de file" used to cause a segmentation violation. Whoops... - Some files which should have included didn't include it - these are now fixed. - Fixed the moondate() and moontime() functions, which used to be incorrect after November 1994. - Fixed the Finnish language support which was missing a few newlines. * Version 3.0 Patch 9 + NOTES - Remind is now too big to compile under the "small" model in MS-DOS. You must recompile everything under the "medium" model. + MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS - Functions moonphase(), moondate() and moontime() were added for dealing with phases of the moon. The code was snarfed from "moontool" by John Walker - see the file "moon.c" for detailed acknowledgement. Also added psmoon() for putting little moon symbols on the PostScript calendar. + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added some more examples to defs.rem - notably, support for ANSI terminal color-changing escape sequences, thanks to Gail Gurman. - Modified both Remind and Rem2PS so that calendars can start on Sunday or Monday, depending on your preference. Unfortunately, the command-line options are different -- for Remind, it's '-m' and for Rem2PS it's '-n' because '-m' was already in use. Based on a suggestion by John Plate and a patch sent by Mikko Silvonen. - The Finnish language support is better - now, all usage and error messages are in Finnish. In addition, the Finnish language module supports the IBM extended character set as well as ISOLATIN1. Thanks to Mikko Silvonen. - Modified Rem2PS to allow more control over the placement of the small calendars, thanks to a suggestion by Frank Vance. Also added option to control the calendar title (e.g., "September 1993") independently of day-of-week headings. - Added the psshade() function to make it easier to shade PostScript calendars. - Allowed a repeat parameter '*num' to be supplied on command line so a 'preview' of many days' worth of reminders can be obtained easily. - Added the $Location system variable. - Allowed an expression to be supplied to EXIT to return an exit status. - Added the FLUSH command. + BUG FIXES - Fixed the MSF-type reminder to fill paragraphs more intelligently. It puts double spaces after '!', '.' and '?', and can handle quotes, brackets, etc. after periods, etc. These characters can be specified with the $EndSent and $EndSentIg system variables. Also modified it so that newlines in the body start new paragraphs, rather than being swallowed as white-space. * Version 3.0 Patch 8 + MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS - Changed the code to more fully support foreign languages - error messages and usage instructions can now be changed. All changes can be localized in the appropriate language.h files. - Added support for the French language, courtesy of Laurent Duperval. Note that the French support is more complete than for other languages - French usage instructions and error messages are supported. - Added support for the Norwegian language, courtesy of Trygve Randen. + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added code for the functions timelocal() and timegm(), courtesy of Lucio de Re. This is for those very few machines whose libraries include neither those functions nor mktime(). - Added the filedate() function. - Allowed the filename to be specified as "-" to cause Remind to take its input from the standard input stream. - Added the "MSF" keyword to cause reminders to be formatted automatically. This keyword paragraph-fills reminder text following user specifications. Based on a suggestion by Ken McGlothlen. - Added the "-e" option to Rem2PS, allowing the PostScript calendar to fill the entire page. Thanks to Arthur G. Yaffe. + BUG FIXES - Corrected the Hebrew holidays Tzom Gedalia, Tzom Tevet, Ta'anit Esther, Tzom Tamuz and Tisha B'Av so they won't occur on Saturday. Corrections made following the algorithm in "Calendrical Calculations" by Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold. - Changed the dutch.h language file as suggested by Erik-Jan Vens. Made month and day names lower-case; corrected the spelling of oktober. - Changed HashVal in var.c to use unsigned arithmetic - it's conceivable that a machine with signed chars could cause problems otherwise. - Changed the LONG_* macros in config.h to LON_* to avoid conflicts with names defined by ANSI C. Thanks to David W. Sanderson. - Allowed the built-in function char() to accept numbers in the range [-128, 255] (but not 0) so that char(asc(s)) works even on machines with signed char types. * Version 3.0 Patch 7 + MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added "system variables" to allow the user more control over Remind operation, and to allow queries about the command-line options from within a reminder script. They allow for specification of longitude and latitude for use by sunrise/sunset calculations. - Added sunrise(), sunset(), isdst() and minsfromutc() functions - these are needed to support sunrise and sunset calculations. + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Allowed the MSG, RUN, CAL, PS and PSF keywords to be used in the same reminder as the SATISFY keyword. This makes many complex reminders more compact. - Added the filedir() function to enable Remind's include to emulate CPP's #include more closely. - Allowed non-root users to use the "-u" option. It only affects the "SHELL", "HOME", "USER" and "LOGNAME" environment variables - it doesn't change the effective uid and gid when run by non-root. - Added built-in function "easterdate" to calculate date of Easter Sunday - function courtesy of Michael Salmon. - Improved the Jewish holiday reminders in "defs.rem" to give advance notice of holidays. - Allowed the "simple calendar" option (-s) to specify a number of weeks as well as a number of months, in the same fashion as the -c option. Thanks to Dave Rickel. + BUG FIXES - Corrected the behaviour of "hebdate" for jahrzeits; added an additional parameter to specify the behaviour of dates in Adar during leap years. - Changed kall so that "kall sh" doesn't commit suicide - patch courtesy of Michael Salmon. * Version 3.0 Patch 6 + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS - Added the PS- and PSFILE-type reminders - these allow you to include arbitrary PostScript code in your PostScript calendars. Useful for shading, drawing graphics on calendars, etc. Use with care, though! - Added the "-ivar=val" option to initialize variables from the command line. Changed the remind-all.* shell scripts to predefine the variable "remind_all". + BUG FIXES - Fixed a bug in the hebmon(), hebday() and hebyear() functions - there was an off-by-one error. Sorry! - Fixed a bug in the hebdate() function which resulted in infinite loops for dates after about 2075 - Fixed a bug in the -u option which sometimes caused a core dump (embarrassed grin!) The fix is due to Tina Hoeltig. Thanks, Tina! * Version 3.0 Patch 5 + MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS: - Added support for the Hebrew calendar - can now specify Jewish holidays easily. Thanks to Amos Shapir for explaining the Hebrew calendar, and to Danny Sadinoff, from whose HEBCAL program I got some inspiration. Also thanks to David W. Tamkin and Frank Yellin for explaining the rules for jahrzeits. + MINOR ENHANCEMENTS: - Allowed the default page size used by Rem2PS to be selected in config.h - Edited the defs.rem file to contain Jewish holidays. Cleaned up some of the examples and improved the layout - thanks to George M. Sipe. - Modified the IIF function to be more general - Updated finnish.h to support the ISO 8859-1 character set, courtesy of Mikko Silvonen. - Changed the date conversion routines to greatly speed up conversion from Julian to yyyy/mm/dd form. + BUG FIXES: - Fixed a bug in which Remind complained incorrectly about a missing quote in the command SET foo "" - Fixed bugs in dosubst.c which caused the %o, %1 and %@ substitutions to be incorrect - Fixed a bug in the man page - thanks to Ed Oskiewicz. * Version 3.0 Patch 4 - Added the -g option - this sorts reminders by date/time before issuing them. (You can see I'm running out of letters to name options!) This feature was suggested by George M. Sipe, Paul D. Smith, and Francois Pinard. - Added the "args()" and "dosubst()" built-in functions - see the man page for details. - Added more support for the ISO 8859-1 character set, and modified the german.h file to take advantage of this, thanks to Robert Joop. - Allowed any character to be used as date and time separator characters (not just "/-:.") - Added support for the Dutch and Finnish languages, thanks to Willem Kasdorp and Mikko Silvonen. (Anyone care to contribute French? Italian? Spanish?) - Made Remind issue a warning if you try to redefine a built-in function. This warning is disabled in 'Hush' mode. - Added the SCANFROM clause to the REM command. This allows reasonably safe moveable OMITs such as the Labour Day example in the manual. - Added more examples to the defs.rem file, and cleaned up some old examples. Note that there are now safe moveable holidays for most U.S. holidays provided in the defs.rem file. - Added the '-k' option, which allows MSG-type reminders to be passed to any system command. (Idea and patch courtesy of Philipp Slusallek.) - Allowed selection of ':' or '.' as time separator characters at compile-time. - Edited the COPYRIGHT file to clarify the rules. Please read them. - Removed hard-coding of "am" and "pm" and placed them in language-specific header files as #defines L_AM and L_PM - Fixed a bug in the FindToken() routine which had, through sheer luck, never been activated until the SCANFROM clause was added! - Fixed the UNTIL clause to check for a valid expiry date. - Removed identifiers in the C source beginning with "_" to conform to ANSI practice. - Fixed a bug in the -u option which resulted in environment variables SHELL and USER not being set correctly. Also made -u set the LOGNAME environment variable. - Fixed a couple of typos in the man page; added LDFLAGS to the Makefile. (Thanks to Dave Wolfe.) - Put my new mailing address in the README files. * Version 3.0 Patch 3 - Corrected bugs in Remind and Rem2PS. No new features added. You should NOT use patch level 2 - either stick to 3.0.1 or upgrade to 3.0.3. * Version 3.0 Patch 2 - Added the -u option to Remind so that root can run it as any user. This simplifies the remind-all scripts, and makes them more efficient. If you are worried that this option is a security hole, you can disable it in config.h - Changed the RUN command so that RUN OFF can be used anywhere, even though RUN ON only works in the top-level file. This eases the management of global files which may want to switch RUN OFF. - Added ISO encoding (ISO 8859-1) to the PostScript output, courtesy of Michael Salmon. This can be selected with the '-i' option in rem2ps. - Added support for the '-' date separator as well as the '/' separator. - Added support for languages other than English. Note that this support is not complete - error messages are still in English. The idea and German translation came from Wolfgang Thronicke. - Changed the -w option to include the "padding" and "spacing" options. NOTE INCOMPATIBILITY: In the previous patch level, creating a weekly calendar using the -c+n option left no blank lines between the day number and the first reminder entry. This has been changed so that one blank line is left. To revert to the old behaviour, use the "-w,,0" option. - Added the -o option to Rem2ps. This allows you to specify the margins when producing a PostScript calendar. - Updated the copyright notices in all the files. :-) - Added 'make clobber' and 'make test' targets to the Unix makefile. - Corrected typos in WHATSNEW.30 and remind.1 man page. Thanks to Dave Wolfe - Changed Remind so that supplying the -a option causes timed reminders not to be placed into the calendar in calendar mode. * Version 3.0 Patch 1 - Wrote the Rem2ps program to produce PostScript calendars - Added an 'install' target to the Makefile - Fixed a bug which allowed the shell() function to execute in timed reminders which were queued with RUN disabled. - Added support for OS/2, courtesy of DARREL HANKERSON - In expressions, can now specify literal dates as 'yyyy/mm/dd' rather than using the date() function. - Fixed all the source files to include "config.h" first. - Changed the way triggers are calculated so that trigger dates are always valid if year, month and day are specified, and there is no UNTIL clause. See MAN page section "DETAILS ABOUT TRIGVALID()." - Defined _POSIX_SOURCE so Remind will compile on SGI workstations (and be more portable... I hope.) - Fixed some rather brain-dead definitions of UPPER and LOWER, as pointed out by - Added more details to the Man page concerning how triggers are computed, and added warnings about computing OMIT dates. - Added the file defs.rem which contains examples of useful definitions and triggers. - Changed the script test-rem to be a sh script instead of csh for improved portability. - Fixed up the README.* files to reflect the changes. - Re-formatted the WHATSNEW.30 file. * Version 3.0 - Total rewrite from previous versions - Added variables, expressions, flow-control statements, daemon mode - Added "expression pasting" - Added CAL-type reminders - Added the SATISFY clause - Improved debugging of reminder scripts - Took out the "purge" option - it is in general too dificult to tell when a reminder has expired for good, so now it's up to you to do this by hand. - Fixed a lurking bug in trigger date calculation which, amazingly, had not been caught in the couple of years that Remind has been out! * Version 2.3 Patch 5 - Added the "c+n" option for printing a calendar by weeks instead of months, courtesy Dennis Cottel (dennis@peanuts.nosc.mil). * Version 2.3 Patch 4 - Made the init.c file nicer. Made the Makefile prettier. Added "make test", "make tar" and "make shar" Makefile targets. * Version 2.3 Patch 3 - Added a command-line option for Remind to process queued reminders in the foreground. This makes automatic termination of Remind processes from within X-Windows and Sunview easier. * Version 2.3 Patch 2 - Fixed up a problem with timed reminders which resulted in cursor not starting from left side of screen on some systems. - Fixed the SIGINT handler for SYSV systems - this was interrupting the sleep(2) system call. - Closed stdin and stdout if remind was part of a pipe - this prevents other sections of the pipe from hanging as remind puts itself in the background. - Added the "-h" (Hush mode) option - Added the "%#" and "%@" modifiers for the current time. - Made the Makefile more portable * Version 2.3 Patch 1 - Added the "-t" command-line option to get Remind to trigger all non-expired reminders. - Added Turbo C support courtesy of Rhys Weatherly - Added the "RUN ON" and "RUN OFF" commands for a secure interface with the Elm mail system. - Added the "rem" shell script for running Remind with a default script. - Added manual pages for "kall" and "rem". * Version 2.3 - Added the UNTIL keyword for forcing reminders to expire. - Added the "++" form of 'back' and the "--" form of 'delta' for ignoring OMIT information. - Added the CLEAR-OMIT-CONTEXT, PUSH-OMIT-CONTEXT and POP-OMIT-CONTEXT keywords for isolating personal or peculiar reminders from the global OMIT context. - Speeded up the parsing of tokens. - Changed the source to recognize and exploit ANSI-C compilers which accept function prototypes. - Added the "-n" option to output the next occurrence of each reminder in SimpleCalendar format - Modified the calendar and SimpleCalendar formats so that the % escape substitutions ARE performed. * Version 2.2 - Patch 5 - Added the BEFORE, AFTER and SKIP tokens to make the handling of holidays more sensible. Also corrected a few more bugs. * Version 2.2 - Patch 3 - Added the MSG or RUN tokens in an OMIT command; also allowed RUN-type reminders to be explicitly included in the calendar by using the %" escape sequence. * Version 2.2 - Added the AT keyword, the timed reminders daemon, and the calendar facility. * Version 2.1 - Added the "repeat" token for repeating reminders with a period other than 7 days. Also fixed some bugs from version 2.0 * Version 2.0 - first public release. Included advanced date specifications, character substitution, and the RUN keyword. * Version 1.0 - never publicly released.