DRAFT: [ANNOUNCE] INN 2.3.0 available

[Russ Allbery]

[ More announcement drafting.  Any and all feedback welcome, yell if
  there's more stuff that INN 2.3.0 should be waiting for; bear in mind
  that we've been in feature freeze for a while and new features should
  go into the 2.4.0 development line. ]

I'm pleased to announce that a new major release of INN is, at long last,
available at

    ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/inn-2.3.0.tar.gz

The MD5 checksum of this release is:

    <to be filled in>

A PGP signature will soon be available in the same directory.  Due to
major architectural changes between INN 2.3.0 and previous releases, there
will be no patch between it and previous releases.  Too many files have
been moved around to make it worthwhile.

INN 2.3.0 represents a significant architectural change to INN, with a
completely new internal overview interface, three new overview mechanisms,
two new article storage mechanisms, and the elimination of quite a few old
interfaces and old code.

The major changes from 2.2.x are:

  * 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.  (Note that the current traditional spool implementation causes
    nightly expire to be extremely slow for a large number of articles, so
    it's not recommended that you use the tradspool storage method for the
    majority of a large spool.)

  * 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.

For more information, including upgrade information, see the file NEWS in
the source tree.

Further 2.3.x releases will be made for bug fixes.  New features will go
into the 2.4.x series, which is already under development.

Please submit all bug reports to inn-bugs at isc.org.  Please send all
patches to inn-patches at isc.org.

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