Draft of changes in 2.4.4

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi,

Here is a suggestion for the section "Changes in 2.4.4" in the NEWS file.
As usual, feel free to correct its wording and also to add other changes
or remove some of them.



* Fixed incomplete checking of packet sizes in the ctlinnd interface in the
no-Unix-domain-sockets case.  This is a potential buffer overflow in
dead code since basically all systems INN builds on support Unix domain
sockets these days.  Also track the buffer size more correctly in the client
side of this interface for the Unix domain socket case.

* Group blocks in incoming.conf are now correctly parsed and no longer cause
segfaults when loading this file.

* Fixed a problem with innfeed continuously segfaulting on amd64 hardware
(and possibly on lots of 64 bits platforms).  Many thanks to Ollivier Robert
for his patch and also to Kai Gallasch for having reported the problem and
provided the FreeBSD server to debug it.

* Fixed a bug in the display of the used compressor (cunbatch
was put if arguments were passed to gzip or bzip2).

* If compiling with BerkeleyDB, use its ndbm compatibility layer for
ckpasswd in preference to searching for a traditional dbm library.
INN also supports BerkeleyDB 4.4 thanks to Marco d'Itri.

* ovdb_init now properly closes stdin/out/err when it becomes a daemon.
The issue was reported by Viktor Pilpenok and fixed by Marco d'Itri.

* Added support for Diablo quickhash and hashfeed algorithms.
It allows to distribute the messages among several peers (new Q flag
for newsfeeds).  Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this implementation
in INN.

* innd now listen on separate sockets for IPv4 and IPv6 connections if the
IPV6_V6ONLY socket option is available.  There might also be operating systems
that still have separate IPv4 and IPv6 TCP implementations, and advanced features
like TCP SACK might not be available on v6 sockets.  Thanks to Miquel van
Smoorenburg for this patch.

* Marco d'Itri added a force-ipv4 peer configuration option for innfeed that,
if set, tells innfeed to never attempt an IPv6 connection to that host.

* Added a "nnrpdflags" parameter to inn.conf (modeled on the concept of
"innflags") to permit passing of command line arguments to instances of
nnrpd spawned from innd.

* A new inn.conf parameter called "pathcluster" has been added:
it allows to append a common name to the Path: header
on all incoming articles.  "pathhost" and "pathalias" (if set)
are still appended to the path as usual, but "pathcluster"
is always appended as the last element (e.g. on the leftmost
side of the Path: header).  Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for
this feature.

* simpleftp has been rewritten to use Net::FTP.  Indeed, ftp.pl is no longer
shipped with Perl 5 and the script did not work.

* perl-nocem will now check for a timeout and re-open the socket
if required.  Additionally, perl-nocem will switch to
cancel_ctlinnd in case cancel_nntp fails after sending
the Message-ID.  Thanks to Christoph Biedl for the patch.  A more
detailed documentation has also been written for perl-nocem.

* The RADIUS configuration is now wrapped in a server {} block.

* Checkgroups when there is nothing to change no longer result in sending
a blank mail to administrators.  Besides, no mail is sent by controlchan
for the creation of a newsgroup when the action is "no change".

* Checkgroups are now properly propagated even though the news server
does not carry the groups they are posted to.

* controlchan and docheckgroups now handle wire format messages so that
articles from the spool can be directly fed to them.

* Newgroup control messages for existing groups now change their description.
If a mail is sent to administrators, it reminds them to update their
newsgroups file.  It also warns when there are missing or obsolete
descriptions.  Furthermore, newsgroups file is now written prettier
(from one to three tabulations between the name of the group and its
short description) and to. groups cannot be created.

* The sample control.ctl file has been extensively updated.

* Fixed empty LISTGROUP replies which were not terminated. Thanks to David Canzi
for the patch.

* In response to a LIST [file] command, if the file does not exist,
we assume it is not maintained and return 503 instead of 215 and
an empty file.  Moreover, capability to LIST ACTIVE.TIMES for a wildmat
pattern as its third argument has been added in order to select wanted
newsgroups.

* If creating a new history file, set the ownership and mode appropriately.
inncheck also expects fewer things to be private to the news user.  Most of the
configuration files will never contain private information like passwords.

* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.




I hope this NEWS file suits you.  Pretty long but, well, INN 2.4.3 is old :)

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Rien ni personne n'a tout à fait tort : même une horloge
  arrêtée a raison deux fois par jour. » (John Steinbeck)