             Technical notes on version 3.8.5 
                      03 January 2002
                        Kern Sibbald

General:
- Added Battery Runtime Calibration to apctest. See the
  apctest chapter of the manual for details.
- Added an apctest chapter to the manual.

Changes submitted this submission:
- apcserial.c check pwdf before attempting to close the file 
  thus avoiding a segmentation fault if the user tries to do
  a kill power by hand in a non-power fail condition.
  A diligent user doing a lot of testing ran into this.
- Added Battery Runtime Calibration to apctest for Smart UPSes.
  To do it "right" required a surprising amount of code.
- A user pointed out that one slackware distribution had a
  two part name, which caused a DISTVER=@DISTVER@ to fail.
  So, I added quotes around all the @DISTVER@s in each
  distribution.  Thanks to a user for point this out.
- In doing a torture test of the NIS server (requesting
  hundreds of thousands of connects), I discovered if the
  connection was broken, apcupsd would get a pipe error
  causing the process to die, or in the case of a pthreaded
  apcupsd, all processes to die. This problem has existed since
  the begining of NIS. In addition, it has existed since
  the beginning of the master/slave code.
   
  Fixed by ignoring SIGPIPE signals.
