beta release new database software

People,

I have made a distribution of the new software. It includes most of
the stuff you would need for indexing and updating a RIPE like database. For
those of you who have been playing with the 2 early releases, here are some
of the changes:

- minor change to key generation routine (to allow certain chars)
- dbupdate can now be used as an email responder
- more stuff made configurable, more configuration options
- some general bug fixes
- a bit more documentation (I know, still nowhere near perfect)

You will need some familiarity with the RIPE database structure to get this
stuff running without much hastle. I have tried making it into a read,
install and run package, but it is not quite really. Please understand that
it IS still beta, and there may well be bugs everywhere, and it may not be as
configurable as you would like, but I'm working on that. I just wanted to get
this thing out so that you could play with it a bit, and see if you like it.

If you do not have some time to spare to install and try to understand it, I
would advide not to get the stuff just yet, but wait for the first real
release (expected some time around the RIPE meeting).

This release does not understand guarded fields yet, all hooks are in, just
some code missing. The indexer and whoisd have been tested by some people
already and did not show any major bugs. The update mechanism is not tested
too well yet, so try building some test databases first to see how that all
works. Most of the working and installation is described in 2 files, INSTALL
and README. README should explain enough to get you started, experiment after
that.

You can find the stuff on:

ncc.ripe.net:dbase-beta/dbase-beta.tar.Z

Directory dbase-beta is unreadable, but you CAN fetch the file and note that
this is NOT on ftp.ripe.net. Oh, you need PERL to run all this stuff ...

Enjoy,

-Marten