A week or so ago, I put a new release, v6.1, of the mers package on my web pages at: http://www.garlic.com/~wedgingt/mers.tgz The prior (non-beta) release was v4.42; v5.x only appeared as beta releases. There is already a newer beta release, as well. Two new programs have been added since v4.42. Mers3p does (slow, non-FFT) base-3 pseudo-prime tests of Mersenne numbers and ecmfactor uses freeLIP's ECM routines to factor arbitrary natural numbers. There are no great speed improvements, only a few fixes and somewhat improved and easier usage; I've included some details below. Will README.html has been somewhat improved and considerably updated, including references to the manual test forms of PrimeNet in preference to emailing George Woltman to get exponents to LL test. The fftll shell script will now ignore a leading 'Test=' so that the PrimeNet form result can be simply cut-and-pasted or saved as a file and the file name given to fftll as an argument. Ecm3 now knows how to handle even exponent Mersennes, including the 'L' and 'M' algebraic factors when the exponent is an odd multiple of four. See README.html and mersfmt.html for more details, including the algebra itself. Ecm3 also has several new flags. Extract and rw.c can now read and contract can produce DATABASE files with exponents larger than 2^24 (about 16.6 million). Extract can now print information from Factor98 save files. Mersdistrib should now compile and run on SGIs and SunOS 5.x. A small Makefile bug for DEC MIPS machines has been fixed. Small problems with libraries in Makefile.nofac have been fixed.
