Well folks,

    It is time for Yet Another Eggdrop Release courtesy of the eggheads
development team (eggdev). This time we have released eggdrop v1.5.4 from
our development series -- hoping that it will be the last such release
before we begin our next stable tree, eggdrop v1.6.0. We have been
developing and testing eggdrop v1.5 for quite sometime and we believe that
all the remaining critical bugs have been found and fixed by now; however,
the possibility for a few bugs do still exist (which is good, cause if there
were none, we'd be out of business).

Assuming that no new major bugs are found in eggdrop v1.5.4 -- we expect to
start releasing eggdrop v1.6.0 release candidates to the general public
within 2 weeks (hopefully sooner) of this release date. Once eggdrop v1.6.0
has been officially released, the eggdrop v1.4 series will no longer be in
development. The reason for this is we feel that eggdrop v1.6.0 is a valid
replacement for the 1.4 tree and therefore see no reason for anyone to
continue using the 1.4 series.

We are sure some people will have doubts as to the functionality and
stability of eggdrop v1.6.0 compared to say eggdrop v1.4.4; however, We are
also sure you will find a great number of people who already rely on eggdrop
v1.5 as their main series (I am one of those people and have been faithfully
using eggdrop v1.5 since it began). In the past, major changes in eggdrop
development did not always go over well .. does everyone remember how well
eggdrop 1.3.0 was accepted over eggdrop v1.1.5? It wasn't very well liked by
a lot of people and still isn't. There are still hardcore eggdrop v1.1.5
users -- we hope eggdrop v1.6.0 will change their mindset.

Now, after explaining that .. I can get onto what is in eggdrop v1.5.4
compared to v1.5.3:

    One of the major things most people (mainly matt) will love is that we
believe the infamous ghost bug is finally fixed and hopefully wont come back
to haunt us; however, incase we are wrong .unlink has been enhanced to
support the removal of ghosted bots so that you are not required to restart
your botnet. Further testing from users will help officially determine if
this bug is completely dead -- it seems we never test our bots as hard as
the average user <grin>.

    Okay, okay, the ghost bug .. now what about other the things?

    Well, there have been three new tcl binds added (tout, lost, and need)
which are explained in doc/tcl-commands.doc. We hope people will like them,
because we do. Also, eggdrop now has the ability to remember a channel key
and if by some chance is kicked or has to leave the channel, it will be able
to attempt rejoin by using the last known channel key. This is a feature
that a lot of users requested. Beyond that, there have been such changes as:

    - improved support for people compiling eggdrop using Cygwin
    - added two new tcl functions to handle IRCnet's !channel type properly
    - global owner sharing was fixed
    - the lagcheck mechanism was fixed.
    - and many, many, smaller bug fixes and behavior tweaks.

For a complete list of updates, you should take a look at doc/UPDATES1.5 and
doc/UPDATES1.4 and the NEWS file.

Now for the download information ..

eggdrop1.5.4.tar.gz:
ftp://ftp.eggheads.org/pub/eggdrop/source/1.5/eggdrop1.5.4.tar.gz
    the md5sum is: 25543dede42b045ede6b7423d7590f2d

(it should be available on the mirrors by tomorrow).

Everyone that was involved in this version of eggdrop deserve a huge thanks
and maybe if you live close to one of them, a case of beer (fabian deserves
many cases of beer even if you do not live near him ... right fabian?).

Enjoy,
Jeff.

--
Jeff Fisher <guppy@eggheads.org>
eggheads.org / eggdrop development