[ANNOUNCE]: LuaSocket 1.4 released

[Diego Nehab <diego@...>]

Hi All,

LuaSocket version  1.4 is now  available for download! It  is compatible
with  Lua 4.0  (Lua 4.1  friendly) and  has been  tested on  Windows 98,
Windows 2000, Linux, AIX, SunOS and IRIX.

What's New

Most of  the changes for  1.4 have been made  on the Lua  modules, which
have been almost completely rewritten.  There have been some API changes
that made  the interface simpler and  more consistent. Here are  some of
the changes that made it into version 1.4:

   * Bug-fix: lua_socketlibopen was leaving the tags structure in Lua's
     stack; 
   * Bug-fix: select was not detecting a timeout when called with zero as
     the timeout limit; 
   * Lua-4.1-alpha friendly, although not yet thread-safe. Will wait until
     4.1 is released; 
   * New parameter passing philosophy using named parameters in tables made
     the interface much simpler (although breaking compatibility); 
   * All modules follow LTN 7 (Modules & Packages) to avoid name space
     collisions (although breaking compatibility); 
   * Better automatic test procedures for all modules; 
   * New URL module, for URL parsing, relative URL resolution and URL
     escaping; 
   * base64.lua has been upgraded and made into the new Code module,
     responsible for content coding translations; 
   * Modules are more RFC pedantic; 
   * lua_socketlibopen now returns an error if it failed to initialize
     WinSock; 
   * There are no ilegitimate global variable accesses, that is, all
     variable references are local unless they need to be global; 
   * More sample code. 

Incompatibilities with previous versions

TCP and UDP code should keep working  without change. HTTP, FTP and SMTP
code should be modified to use the new improved API.

The library is available from

     http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/luasocket

Regards,
Diego.