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GNU C Library NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.  1998-03-04

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Version 2.1

* Richard Henderson corrected size of struct timeval on Linux/Alpha to
  conform to POSIX member type requirements.  Symbol versions have been
  adjusted as needed within the library, and for direct use by applications,
  but there is potential for problems if third-party libraries use
  struct timeval as part of their interface.  This does not present
  a problem for X and other "essential" system libraries.

* An additional locale model to support C++ Standard Library locale
  model and probably more was implemented by Ulrich Drepper.

* Eric Youngdale and Ulrich Drepper implemented versioning of objects on
  symbol level.

* Miles Bader provided the `argp' function family to support hierachical
  command line argument parsing, layered on top of getopt.

* strtod accepts new hexadecimal floating-point format from ISO C 9X.

* printf has two new specifiers %a and %A to print hexadecimal flaoting-point
  numbers.

* scanf recognizes the %a and %A format for scanning floating point numbers.

* the new headers <stdint.h> and <inttypes.h> from ISO C 9X provides
  information and interfaces for the available integer types.

* the new header <complex.h> contains definitions of the complex math
  functions from ISO C 9X.

* the new header <tgmath.h> defines generic macros to use complex or
  real valued functions.

* Thorsten Kukuk provided an implementation for NIS+, securelevel 0, 1 and 2.

* Andreas Jaeger provided a test suite for the math library.

* Mark Kettenis implemented the utmpx interface and an utmp daemon.

* Ulrich Drepper added character conversion functions.

* Optimized string functions have been added.

* The localedata addon is now part of glibc.

* An implementation of profiling shared libraries was added by Ulrich Drepper.

* Thorsten Kukuk and Ulrich Drepper provided an implementation for a caching
  daemon for NSS (nscd).

  Missing a better place here are some numbers on improvements.  Under
  Linux 2.1.125 un-tar-ing the kernel sources takes

				  user	system	   wall

    using local files		12.19s	 6.88s	 22.91s

    using NIS			13.92s	 8.91s	 26.34s

    using NIS & nscd		10.37s	 7.34s	 25.30s

    using NIS+			27.57s	30.37s  640.46s

    using NIS+ & nscd           10.25s   7.83s   26.51s

    using NIS & old nscd [1]	13.83s	 8.32s	 29.60s

  Keep in mind that non-namelookup related operations dominate above times.
  It was just a common complain that using NIS+ unpack