I'm pleased to announce the pre-release of version 0.9 of the OpenISR 
system.  This version contains substantial improvements over the 0.8 
series, including a new inter-parcel hoard cache, enhanced performance 
and security, and a simplified client-server protocol.  OpenISR 0.9 will 
be released in a couple weeks, and due to the magnitude of the changes 
since the 0.8 series, we would like to invite the broader OpenISR user 
community to test the software before release.

Testing OpenISR 0.9-pre involves two steps: installing the 0.9-pre 
client and upgrading your parcels.  Installing the client requires 
checking out the source code from our Git repository, since binary 
packages will not be available until the release of 0.9.  Upgrading your 
parcels is necessary because the parcel storage format has changed 
significantly since the 0.8 series, and involves a server-side operation 
in which your parcel is copied from its existing server to a different 
server running the OpenISR 0.9 server software.

To obtain the 0.9-pre client code from our Git repository, execute the 
following command:

git clone git://scarlet.aura.cs.cmu.edu/openisr.git

or, for those of you with access to Coda,

git clone /coda/coda.cs.cmu.edu/project/openisr/openisr.git

To install the client, first uninstall any existing OpenISR binary 
packages on your system, then run the following commands in the top 
directory of the source tree:

As yourself:
./autogen.sh
./configure --sysconfdir=/etc
make

As root:
make install
ldconfig
depmod
udevcontrol reload_rules
/etc/init.d/openisr start

See the README file for more information on the packages that must be 
installed in order to build and run the OpenISR software.  In addition 
to the kernel header package for your kernel version and the "-dev" 
packages for the required libraries, you must have Autoconf, Automake, 
and Libtool installed on your system in order to build the client from 
the Git repository.

To upgrade your parcels, please contact Matt Toups <mtoups_at_cs.cmu.edu>, 
who will perform the upgrade operation on the server.  The upgrade 
process does not modify your 0.8-compatible parcels on the existing 
server, so you will be able to revert to 0.8.x in case you encounter 
problems with 0.9.

If you upgrade to 0.9-pre and encounter bugs, please report them to this 
mailing list or directly to me.  We will do our best to assist with any 
problems you may encounter.

--Benjamin Gilbert