Sun/IRAF V2.11.1 PATCH RELEASED
DEC Alpha and HP-UX IRAF-V2.11 platform upgrades released
-----------------------------------------------------------

The following new IRAF V2.11 platform upgrades are now available:

    o	DEC Alpha platforms running Digital Unix V4.0 or later (DUNX/IRAF).

    o	Hewlett-Packard platforms running HP-UX 10.20 or greater (HPUX/IRAF).

    o	The first patch to Sun/IRAF, upgrading the system to V2.11.1, is
	now available.  This includes support for Solaris 2.6.

All of the above platforms are at the same IRAF patch level, V2.11.1, the
most recent version of IRAF V2.11.  Distributions will be found in
ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/v211/.  Please read the README file in the
distribution directory for platform specific release notes and instructions,
plus technical notes on any late-breaking problems found or updates made
since this announcement.  Follow-up notes on these releases are posted to
the adass.iraf.system newsgroup (also available as a moderated mailing
list if you have given up on USENET; subscriptions are available via the
IRAF web pages).

We are working with STScI to get precompiled binaries online for TABLES
and STSDAS on the DEC Alpha and HP.  STScI is planning a patch in the near
future to update these packages to V2.11.1, fix porting bugs and probably
add some new features, but we may be able to provide interim binaries for
use in the meantime since we have the platforms here and we always build
these packages when we do a platform upgrade.  When ready, these will be
found within the /contrib/tables and /contrib/stsdas subdirectories on
iraf.noao.edu.

PC-IRAF (e.g. Linux) should be out next, followed by SGI IRIX/IRAF and 
IBM AIX/IRAF, then the other platforms (OpenVMS, VAX/VMS, Decstation etc.).


A summary of the more important revisions made since the initial 8/29
release follows.  See the V2.11 system notes file included in the patch
for a complete list of the changes (file $iraf/local/notes.v211).

    o	Image i/o was modified to add an "ambiguous image name" error trap.
	When an existing image is accessed as e.g. "pix", and several images
	exist matching this name (e.g. pix.imh, pix.fits, pix.pl), an error
	exit is taken.  Previously one of the images would be operated upon
	with no indication of any error.

    o	Applications bug fixes: imcombine, phistogram, rfits, imcopy, imexpr,
	linmatch.

    o	Feature (imreplace): added a new parameter to allow all pixels within
	a certain radius of a bad pixel to also be replaced.

    o	The IEEE i/o package was modified to detect IEEE subnormals on input
	and map them to zero (this affects tasks like rfits).

    o	Support for "oifversion" added to IMFORT.

    o	Bug fix (CL): sexagesimal input conversion now done in double instead
	of float due to precision problems.

    o	Bug fix (IMIO, IMFORT): Could not update version 1 (old format)
	image headers.

    o   Added two new, experimental WCS function drives for TNX (tangent
	plane plus polynomials) and ZPX (zenithal radial polynomials).
	These are used for optically distorted astrometric applications,
	e.g.  the NOAO Mosaic wide field camera.

    o	Bug fix (IMFORT): The get-next-keyword code was not returning the
	user fields of the header.

    o	Bug fix (IMIO): Filtering added to prevent any unprintable characters
	(such as tab or newline) from getting into FITS card images.

    o	IMIO: get-next-keyword now ignores non-keyword header lines such as
	comments, history, and blank lines.

    o	Bug fix (QPOE/QPIO): Fixed a typo affecting "def[xy]block" keywords
	in QPOE file headers (used to set the default blocking factor).

    o	Bug fix: Updated the login.cl file in $iraf/local for V2.11.

    o	FITS kernel: minor bug fixes and tuning.

    o	Two new files NAMES and INDEX were added in sys$, providing a means
	for indexing library procedures and library external names (used for 
	software development).  NAMES is useful to check for library name
	collisions.

As always, please report any problems including errors in the release
documentation, especially if you install a distribution within several
days of this announcement.

Sat Dec 27 23:21:35 MST 1997