Status of INN 2.4.0 (was: Last call for INN 2.3.2)

[Russ Allbery]

The Doctor <doctor at doctor.nl2k.ab.ca> writes:
> On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 06:06:33AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I think most of what sped up current was the new data handling that
>> Katsuhiro did.  Those changes were pretty comprehensive; I won't find
>> the time to backport them to STABLE, and I'm not sure it's a good use
>> of time given that 2.4.0 is scheduled to be released this summer.

> How close to beta is 2.4.0??
 
Beta isn't a concept that we've been using very much in INN development;
we've been going straight from snapshots to release candidates.  But I'm
guessing that the underlying question is "when is 2.4.0 going to be
roughly feature-complete", and the answer is as soon as we get through the
currently listed TODO items for 2.4.0 or decide that we won't finish them
in time and put them off.

Currently, that's:

* Write new generic configuration file parsing code based on a tree of
  hash tables and the basic file syntax seen in readers.conf,
  innfeed.conf, storage.conf, and incoming.conf.  The goal of the parser
  is to support a single common, simple syntax, to allow configuration
  files to be both read and written back to disk by programs, to
  generalize the parsing sufficiently so that it can eventually be used by
  all parts of INN, and to try to minimize the number of places that have
  to be changed to add a new configuration parameter.  [Russ is working on
  this.]

* Implement the inn.conf parser using the new configuration parsing
  library and supply a script to make any necessary changes from the old
  file format to the new file format.

* Complete rewrite of history.  History should have a single API and the
  same interface for both innd and nnrpd, the current WIP cache and
  history cache should be integrated into that interface, things like
  message ID hashing should become a selectable property of the history
  file, and the history API should support multiple backend storage
  formats and automatically select the right one for an existing history
  file based on stored metainformation.  [Alex Kiernan is working on
  this.]

* Integrate IPv6 support.  [Marco d'Itri has a patch which needs some
  work.]

* Replace the current innshellvars mechanism with a real INN Perl module
  for Perl programs, and include the necessary glue so that other Perl
  modules can be added to INN's build tree and installed with INN,
  allowing their capabilities to be available to the portions of INN
  written in Perl.  [Russ will be working on this.]

* A complete audit of INN against the latest NNTP protocol draft, with at
  least a report on the differences and preferrably all issues fixed.
  [Russ plans on doing this.]

* Switch at least nnrpd over to using the new wildmat routines rather than
  breaking apart strings on commas and matching each expression
  separately.

The parser work is ongoing; I'm writing design documents now and the code
won't be too complex.  I may defer anything not necessary for inn.conf
until after 2.4.0.  The history API is, I believe, done or nearly done.
IPv6 has a preliminary patch that needs some additional work.  The other
items haven't been started yet.

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