[ANNOUNCE] INN 2.6.0 available

Russ Allbery rra at isc.org
Tue Sep 22 03:23:22 UTC 2015


Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce that a new major
release of INN is available at:

   ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/inn-2.6.0.tar.gz

The SHA-256 checksum of this release is:

   ba96be8e87c2b56bf896c9f96492ed7706beb68e082794f8fabc7058a1804da7

A PGP signature is available in the same directory.  Due to the extensive
changes between INN 2.5 and INN 2.6, no patch is available.

INN 2.6.0 is almost entirely compatible with INN 2.5, and most INN 2.5
users will be able to upgrade with a simple "make update".  A few checks
explained in the upgrade changes below should also be made.

All of the applicable bug fixes from the INN 2.5 STABLE series are also
included in INN 2.6.

Further 2.6.x releases will be made for bug fixes.  New features will go
into the 2.7.x series, which is already under development.  Please note
that the STABLE development branch is now INN 2.6.x, and there will be no
further INN 2.5.x releases after INN 2.5.5.

Many thanks to Julien ÉLIE for preparing this release.

Upgrading from 2.5 to 2.6

  The following changes require your full attention because a manual
  intervention may be needed:

  * The name and location of the pullnews configuration file have changed.
    It is now pullnews.marks, located in *pathdb* when pullnews is run as
    the news user, or otherwise in the running user's home directory. 
    This file was previously stored in .pullnews in the running user's
    home directory (even for the news user).  If you use pullnews, you
    need to manually move and rename the configuration file; otherwise, it
    will no longer work.  Note that the -c flag passed to pullnews allows
    to specify another configuration file, if need be.

  * The default location of the mailpost database directory has changed
    from *pathtmp* to *pathdb*.  If you use mailpost without an explicitly
    specified database directory (using the -b flag), then you should
    manually move your current database files mailpost-msgid.dir and
    mailpost-msgid.pag from *pathtmp* to *pathdb*.

  * If you have been using SSL/TLS with nnrpd before, be aware that the
    default value of a few inn.conf parameters have changed:  the server
    now decides the preferred cipher (instead of the client), and only TLS
    protocols are allowed (using the flawed SSLv2 and SSLv3 protocols is
    now disabled).  If you want to change these settings, the respective
    *tlspreferserverciphers* and *tlsprotocols* parameters can be tuned to
    your needs.

  * The --with-kerberos configure flag used to add Kerberos v5 support has
    been renamed to --with-krb5.

  * The --with-berkeleydb configure flag used to add Berkeley DB support
    has been renamed to --with-bdb.

  * The --enable-ipv6 configure flag no longer exists.  IPv6 is now
    unconditionally enabled, if available.

  * $HOME is no longer exported as an environment variable by
    innshellvars, innshellvars.tcl and the Perl module "INN::Config".  It
    was previously overriding the default user home directory with
    *pathnews*.  If you use these scripts in your own scripts, you will
    have to take care of that change.

  * Owing to the implementation of RFC 4643 (AUTHINFO USER/PASS) in innd,
    if remote peers have to authenticate in order to feed articles, they
    now have to send a username (which was previously wrongly optional),
    before sending their password.  The mandatory username, though
    currently unused by innd, can be whatever the remote peer wishes.  In
    previous versions of INN, inncheck was already complaining when
    passwd.nntp contained an empty username associated with a password.

    A manual review of authenticated feeds should then be done so as to
    ensure that they are properly working.

  * The Injection-Date: and Injection-Info: headers are now generated by
    nnrpd at injection time instead of the NNTP-Posting-Date:,
    NNTP-Posting-Host:, X-Complaints-To: and X-Trace: headers.  Local
    scripts that were using (for authentication, privacy, etc.) these now
    deprecated headers should be updated.  Also note that the Path: header
    of locally posted articles can also contain the contents of the
    deprecated NNTP-Posting-Host: field.

  * The two *addnntppostingdate* and *addnntppostinghost* parameters in
    inn.conf have been respectively renamed to *addinjectiondate* and
    *addinjectionpostinghost*.  innupgrade takes care of the modification
    only for inn.conf; a manual change will therefore be needed for
    readers.conf, if these parameters are overridden in this file.

  * The default values of a few inn.conf parameters have changed to make
    use of the vastly expanded storage and RAM commonly available today:
    datamovethreshold (from 8192 to 16384), msgidcachesize (from 16000 to
    64000), overcachesize (from 64 to 128), and wireformat (now enabled by
    default).

    The generation of status reports and performance timings are now also
    enabled by default:  logstatus and nnrpdoverstats parameters, with a
    frequency of 10 minutes (status and timer parameters).

  * The default value of max-queue-size has changed from 5 to 20, and
    use-mmap now defaults to true for innfeed.conf.

  If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.5, see also
  "Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.5" in the INSTALL file included in the
  distribution.

Major changes from 2.5 to 2.6

  * The NNTP protocol requires a username to be sent before a password
    when authentication is used.  innd was wrongly allowing only a
    password to be sent by authenticated peers.  See the note above for
    more details.

  * The Lines: header is no longer generated by nnrpd at injection time.

  * The Injection-Date: header is now generated by nnrpd at injection time
    instead of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Date: header, when
    *addinjectiondate* is set to true.  Note that *addnntppostingdate* has
    been renamed to *addinjectiondate* in inn.conf.

  * The Injection-Info: header is now generated by nnrpd at injection time
    instead of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Host: (when
    *addinjectionpostinghost* is set to true), X-Complaints-To: and
    X-Trace: headers.  Note that *addnntppostinghost* has been renamed to
    *addinjectionpostinghost* in inn.conf.  The Path: header of locally
    posted articles now also contains the contents of the
    NNTP-Posting-Host: header.

  * A new *addinjectionpostingaccount* parameter has been added in
    inn.conf.  When set to true, the Injection-Info: header field contains
    an additional posting-account attribute that mentions the username
    assigned to the user at connection time or after authentication.  The
    default value for this parameter is false.

  * A few headers are now considered as obsolete by nnrpd at injection
    time:  NNTP-Posting-Date:, NNTP-Posting-Host:, X-Complaints-To:,
    X-Trace:, Also-Control:, Article-Names:, Article-Updates:, and
    See-Also: headers.

    Besides, nnrpd will similarly reject obsolete sendsys, senduuname and
    version control messages.

  * The presence of a Subject: header field beginning with "cmsg " no
    longer causes an article to be interpreted as a control message by
    nnrpd at injection time.

  * nnrpd no longer differentiates IHAVE from POST.  Articles injected
    with IHAVE are now treated as though they were injected with POST.  It
    means that if the previous behaviour of IHAVE was expected, innd
    should handle itself the connection instead of nnrpd.

  * The name of the pullnews configuration file is now pullnews.marks
    located in *pathdb* when pullnews is run as the news user, or
    otherwise in the running user's home directory.  It was previously
    stored in .pullnews in the running user's home directory (even for the
    news user).

  * Fixed a leak of semaphores when using buffindexed.  Thanks to Richard
    Kettlewell for having fixed the issue.

  * Building with Libtool is no longer optional.  The --enable-libtool
    option to configure has been removed.

  * DESTDIR and non-root installs are now properly supported and
    documented in INSTALL.  The "make install", "make update" and "make
    cert" steps properly obey DESTDIR.  Besides, it is no longer a
    requirement that the installation step be done by the superuser, as
    long as the user executing the install has supplied a DESTDIR value
    that points to a writable directory, *and* the person or process
    performing the install corrects the file ownerships when INN is
    installed on the system on which it's going to run.  Thanks to James
    Ralston for this support.

  * When building INN with Berkeley DB, Cyrus SASL, Kerberos v5, OpenSSL,
    or zlib support, no longer add standard locations to compiler and
    linker include flags.  Such default paths are now added only if
    explicitly given to one or more of the --with-bdb, --with-bdb-include,
    --with-bdb-lib, --with-sasl, --with-sasl-include, --with-sasl-lib,
    --with-krb5, --with-krb5-include, --with-krb5-lib, --with-openssl,
    --with-openssl-include, --with-openssl-lib, --with-zlib,
    --with-zlib-include, or --with-zlib-lib configure flags (the flags
    ending with "-include" and "-lib" are new in INN 2.6.0).

  * If the Berkeley DB, Cyrus SASL, Kerberos v5, or OpenSSL SSL and crypto
    libraries are found at configure time, INN will now be built with
    support for them unless respectively the --without-bdb,
    --without-sasl, --without-krb5, or --without-openssl flags are
    explicitly passed to configure.

    Note that it was already the default behaviour for zlib support when
    Berkeley DB support was also enabled.

  * The configure flag --enable-reduced-depends has been added to request
    that library probes assume shared libraries are in use and
    dependencies of libraries should not be probed.  It therefore tries to
    minimize the shared library dependencies of the resulting binaries on
    platforms with proper shared library dependencies.  This is not
    enabled by default, and is of interest primarily to people building
    packages for distributions.

  * Building INN with Python support now requires the use of Python 2.2.0
    or later as the distutils.sysconfig module used was introduced with
    Python 2.2.0.

  * The INN test suite driver is now fully synchronized with the upstream
    version of the C TAP Harness package maintained by Russ Allbery. 
    Keeping the INN test suite driver up-to-date will be possible thanks
    to a new getc-tap-harness script in the support directory that
    automatically fetches the latest upstream changes.

    Similarly, the new getrra-c-util script permits to keep most of the
    utility and portability functions synchronized with the upstream
    version of the rra-c-util package maintained by Russ Allbery.

  * Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.

INN is discussed on <inn-workers at lists.isc.org>.  Please send any bug
reports or patches to that list.

                                                Russ Allbery
                                                rra at isc.org


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