------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--                                                                          --
--                   GNAT DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS ANNEX DOCUMENTS               --
--                                                                          --
--                                R E A D M E                               --
--                                                                          --
-- GLADE is  free software;  you  can  redistribute  it  and/or  modify  it --
-- under terms of the  GNU General Public License  as published by the Free --
-- Software  Foundation;  either version 2,  or  (at your option) any later --
-- version. GLADE is distributed in the  hope that  it will  be useful, but --
-- WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;  without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABI- --
-- LITY or FITNESS  FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the  GNU General  Public --
-- License  for more details.  You should  have received a copy of the  GNU --
-- General  Public  License distributed with  GLADE; see  file COPYING.  If --
-- not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, --
-- Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.                                              --
--                                                                          --
--                   GLADE is maintained by ACT Europe.                     --
--                       (email:report@adacore.com)                         --
--                                                                          --
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is release __glade_version__ of the Ada 95 distributed systems annex
for GNAT __gnat_version__. New features are described in file NEWS.

Contents.
---------
   Introduction: Ada 95 & Distributed Systems.
   Installation, Documentation & Examples.
   What Does It Run on.
   Downloading GLADE.
   Commercial Support.
   Bug Reports & Technical Questions.
   Submitting Bug Fixes.
   GLADE History.
   Contributions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

Additional information can be found in files INSTALL and NEWS as well
as in the 'Doc' directory.

Introduction: Ada 95 & Distributed Systems.
-------------------------------------------

Ada 95 is the first general-purpose language to provide a standard
distributed programming paradigm. By combining the distributed and
object-oriented features of Ada 95, it is possible to create an
application where objects are physically distributed over a network of
machines, without having to interface to any low-level communication
layer.  Likewise, by combining the distributed and real-time
capabilities of Ada 95, it is possible to design applications which
meet real-time constraints in a distributed environment.

GLADE is an implementation of the Distributed Systems Annex for the
GNAT compiler. GLADE stands for GNAT Library for Ada Distributed
Execution. It is an complete environment for developping distributed
applications that includes: 

     - a complete PCS (Partition Communication System)
     - a simple partition description language & tool
     - utilities to build and start distributed applications

The caller and receiver stubs needed by the PCS are generated by the
GNAT compiler using special flags. The partitioning tool is
responsible for calling GNAT with the appropriate flags.

Installation, Documentation & Examples.
---------------------------------------

To see how to install the system please read file INSTALL in this
directory. Please look under the "Doc" directory for documentation on
how to use GLADE and some more hints on installation possibilities.
Directory "Examples" contains some examples on how to program a
distributed application in Ada 95.

If you have a problem making your partitions connect with each other,
please check that:

  - You can use rsh from any machine involved in the distributed
    application to any other.

  - Your /etc/hosts file (on Unix systems) does not associate your
    machine name with the 127.0.0.1 address; be aware that some systems
    come misconfigured by default.

What does it run on.
--------------------

This release is fully supported on:
  - Sparc/Solaris (2.4 and above)
  - PC/Linux
  - Alpha/Decunix
  - Windows NT
  - HP/HP-UX
    * HPUX-11 with PThreads
    * HPUX-10 and above with DCEThreads using starters None and Shell

It has been successfully ported on:
  - SGI
  - AIX

Please contact ACT Europe (sales@act-europe.fr) for support
information and future platforms availibility.

Downloading GLADE.
------------------

You can download GLADE by anonymous ftp from cs.nyu.edu (cd
pub/gnat/glade) and the usual GNAT mirror sites around the world.

There is an official WWW page for GLADE containing the major annoucements
as well as the mailing-lists archives (see below):

      http://www.act-europe.fr/glade.html

Commercial Support.
-------------------

Commercial support, consulting and training for GLADE are available
from ACT Europe and Ada Core Technologies. Contact sales@act-europe.fr
for further details.

Bug Reports & Technical Questions.
----------------------------------

Bug reports related to the implementation of the distribution annex as
well as any report or techincal query regarding GNAT itself should be
sent to <report@adacore.com>, following the usual reporting procedures.

Please put one bug per email message, and add a short but specific
subject (a general subject like "Distribution bug" is not so useful, a
title like "bad exception propagation across partition" is more
useful).

Please include full sources. We can't duplicate errors without the
full sources. Include all sources in the single e-mail message with
appropriate indications in the multiple file cases, see below.

Please send all sources in plain ASCII form, we can't process
compressed, uuencoded, etc. messages in our current form (they have to
go through extra steps, and easily get lost, separated from the author
etc during this process).

Please include COMPLETE identification of the version of the system
you are running.

To be maximally helpful, for a report that contains multiple separate
compilation units, and hence multiple files, submit them in the form
of a single file that is acceptable input to gnatchop i.e. contains no
non-Ada text. If you use banners to separate the files, make sure they
are composed entirely of blank lines or Ada comments.

If you want to be maximally helpful, try to reduce your example to a
simple one but DON'T spend too much time doing this.

If you think that you have found a bug in GNATDIST, use the -v flag of
GNATDIST and send the full output of the command.

If a bug involves incorrect operation of the generated code, then the
first thing the program should do is to output a line indicating the
expected output or behavior. If at all possible, do a test later on
that prints out "passed" or "failed" depending on the behavior. Of
course it may not always be possible to structure a test this way, but
that's the most convenient form (for obvious reasons!)

Submitting Bug Fixes.
---------------------

If you find a bug and would like to submit fixes, please do so indicating
what release you use. We accept patch files. To produce such a patch
file, put your files in the directory PCS and our files in the directory
PCS.orig, and use the following command:

  diff --recursive --context PCS.orig PCS > patch_file

and send us the patch_file via E-mail at the address above.

If your diff version do not understand the --recursive or --context
option, please use the GNU diffutils package which may be found on any
GNU archive (e.g. ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/gnu/).

Note that unified diff files (-u option of GNU diff) are also welcomed.

GLADE History.
--------------

GLADE has been jointly developed by Ada Core Technologies and a research
team from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST).
The ENST team is composed of:
  Laurent Pautet (pautet@inf.enst.fr),
  Samuel Tardieu (sam@inf.enst.fr).

Contributions.
---------------

GLADE filtering is part of a free contribution (04/97) from
Prof. A. Strohmeier, T. Wolf and J. Kienzle (EPFL, Lausanne,
Switzerland). Extra filters are available on:

      http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/filters.html

The basic principles behind this contribution for filtering is
described in the following paper: J. Kienzle, Th. Wolf, A. Strohmeier:
"Secure Communication in Distributed Ada", Proceedings of Ada-Europe
'96, Montreux, Switzerland, June 1996, published as Lecture Notes in
Computer Science 1088, pp. 198 - 210, Springer 1996.

The ZIP filter has been built on top of the zlib library developed by 
Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. See Garlic/zlib/README for details.

GLADE replay features is part of a free contribution (04/97) from D. Neri
<d92-dne@nada.kth.se>, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm,
Sweden).