INN 2.3.0 public beta

[Russ Allbery]

I think it's about time for an announcement along these lines, as we've
been generating the snapshots for a while and I fixed most of my list of
pending issues yesterday and the day before.

Public beta versions of INN 2.3.0 are now available.  You can get them
from <ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/snapshots/>, the files named inn-BETA-*.
Take the latest version; new snapshots are generated nightly.  These are
the release candidates for the upcoming 2.3.0 release.

Known issues with the current beta, to be fixed before the release:

 - The man page for makehistory needs some work, per recent discussion
   here.

Please report any additional issues that you encounter to
inn-bugs at isc.org.

Changes from 2.2 to 2.3

    * New readers.conf file (replaces nnrp.access) which allows more
      flexible specification of access restrictions.  Included in the sample
      implementations is a RADIUS-based authenticator.

    * Unified overview has been replaced with an overview API, and there are
      now three separate overview implementations to choose from.  One
      (tradindexed) is very like traditional overview but uses an additional
      index file for faster responses to readers.  The second (buffindexed)
      uses circular buffers and can handle a higher incoming article rate
      while still being fast for readers.  The third (ovdb) uses Berkeley DB
      to store overview information (so you need to have Berkeley DB
      installed to use it).  The ovmethod key in inn.conf chooses the
      overview method to use.

    * All article storage and retrieval is now done via the storage API. 
      Traditional spool is now available as a storage type under the storage
      API.

    * The timecaf storage method has been added, similar to timehash but
      storing multiple articles in a single file.  See INSTALL for details
      on it.

    * INN now supports embedded Python filters as well as Perl and TCL
      filters, and supports Python authentication hooks.

    * There is preliminary support for news reading over SSL, using OpenSSL.

    * To simplify anti-abuse filtering, and to be more compliant with news
      standards and proposed standards, INN now treats as control messages
      only articles containing a Control header.  A Subject line beginning
      with `cmesg ' is no longer sufficient for a message to be considered a
      control message, and the Also-Control header is no longer supported.

    * inews is not installed setgid news and rnews is not installed setuid
      root by default any more.  If you need the old permissions, you have
      to give a flag to configure.  See INSTALL for more details.

    * The INN build system no longer uses subst.  This should be mostly
      transparent to users, apart from the old annoyance of modifications to
      include files being overridden again by subst when building INN being
      a thing of the past.

    * The build and installation system has been substantially overhauled. 
      make update now updates scripts as well as binaries and documentation,
      there is better support for parallel builds (with make -j), there is
      less needless make recursion, and far more of the system-dependent
      configuration is handled directly by autoconf.  libtool build support
      (including shared library support) should be better than previous
      releases.

    * All of the applicable bug fixes from INN 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 are also
      included in INN 2.3.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>