GNUbatch Release 1.0
====================

  Copyright 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

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Welcome to GNUbatch. This is a product formerly known as Xi-Batch
written by John Collins who has a company called Xi Software Ltd in
the UK. This became an official GNU package on 17th February 2009.

The intention is to provide a comprehensive batch scheduling system
for UNIX systems and GNU/Linux with transparently shared jobs and
job control variables across the network.

The first version of the product was written in 1990 and it has been
added to and refined ever since. However please read TODO regarding
future ideas for the product.

This has been edited so as to talk about GNUbatch rather than Xi-Batch
and names suitably changed. It should be able to talk to other
machines running Xi-Batch although the port numbers are different and
will have to be changed on one.

To build and install the product, please see INSTALL first.

Please also see the manuals in subdirectories of "doc", which were in
OpenOffice 1 format, but have been rather hastily edited and converted
to ODF in OODoc. Please send bug reports as you find them. I
haven't altered the pictures which currently talk about Xi-Batch and Xi
Software rather than GNUbatch and FSF. I've also put some rather
out-of-date man pages (done in Perl POD) in poddoc. Prominent in the
TODO list is translating this to TexInfo format.

Also included is the MS-Windows sources for the MS Windows client
software using MFC and on MS Visual C++ which needs converting to Free
Software. This does actually work and people use it but MFC is about
as far from Free Software as you can get. Also it's vastly inferior to
the standard C++ library which is available as Free Software.

I also include the web interface software which does work using Free
Software but I concede needs rewriting probably using PHP.

I hope you will find this useful and help develop the product beyond
what I imagined.

John Collins
February 2009
