ANNOUNCE: Exscript 0.9.9

[Samuel]

Introduction
-------------
Exscript is a scripting language for automating Telnet or SSH
sessions. It supports a wide range of features, such as
parallelization, AAA authentication methods, TACACS, and a very simple
template language.

This release comes with many new features, and the documentation was
also greatly improved. Please refer to the project page for
documentation.

A lot of changes were made since release 0.9.8, so 0.9.9 was added
before the final 1.0. Hopefully this will be the last release before
1.0 stable.

New since 0.9.8
------------------
* The SSH adapter was completely reworked and should now be on par
with the Telnet adapter.
* The telnet adapter now supports negotiation. This means that a
connection should now automatically choose a script-friendly terminal
type. (e.g. one that uses no color control characters).
* Exscript is now fully supported on Python >= 2.2.
* SSH support is now optional. The protocol adapters are now loaded
dynamically, such that SSH does not have to be installed if only
Telnet is used.
* The error handling of the parser was greatly improved, and more
errors should now be detected at compile time.
* Prompt recognition was further improved.
* It is now possible to use \r and \n in strings.
* Strings may now be concatenated using the "." operator.
* Added "in" and "not in" operators for searching through a list.
* Fixed: Escaping of some characters outside of code context did not
work.
* Fixed: Escaping quotes in a string would not work.
* Added support for using $-prefixed variable names in strings.
* Added the builtin variable "response", that now includes the
response of the last command.
* #-prefixed lines are now comments.
* Fixed a bug that some operations would not work when accessing the
iterator variable in the body of a loop tag.
* Fix: In several cases accessing a variable would fail.
* Added support for "while" and "until" loops.
* Added support for "into" keyword.
* Use friendlier thread names.

Dependencies
-------------
* Python 2.2 or greater
* Python-crypto
* Python-pexpect (optional, for SSH support)
* ssh (optional, for SSH support)

Download Exscript
------------------
Release: http://exscript.googlecode.com/files/exscript-0.9.9.tgz
SVN instructions: http://code.google.com/p/exscript/source

Links
------
Exscript project page: http://code.google.com/p/exscript/
Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/exscript
Bug tracker: http://code.google.com/p/exscript/issues/list
Browse the source: http://exscript.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/